Are we still a nation that allows free conscience?

WASHINGTON — Two of the top news stories this past week have revolved around reproductive rights, though both raise far more troubling issues than a woman's right to contraception or abortion.

The more compelling questions concern a person's or an institution's freedom of conscience and the right to act upon one's moral beliefs without fear of intimidation and/or government coercion.

Both cases — one involving the Catholic Church and the other, Susan G. Komen for the Cure — deal with the ongoing conflict between the pro-life and pro-choice camps. And both are exposing the dangerous extent to which some pro-choice advocates, including the president of the United States, are willing to tread on fundamental freedoms in order to impose and secure ideological purity.

To recap: Komen created a firestorm with its recent decision to stop donating about $680,000 a year to Planned Parenthood. (On Friday, Komen released a statement noting that Planned Parenthood will be eligible for future grants, although they won't be guaranteed.) The money was supposed to be used for breast cancer screening. Most Planned Parenthood affiliates don't do mammograms but refer women elsewhere, sometimes reimbursing them using Komen funds.

Komen CEO and founder Nancy Brinker has offered a couple of reasons for the decision, including the preference to directly fund mammograms, but insists that it had nothing to do with politics or abortion. Not everyone is buying her varying explanations, especially critics who point to Komen's senior vice president for public policy, Karen Handel, a well-known GOP pro-lifer. A former Georgia secretary of state, Handel lost her run for governor in part, ironically, because pro-lifers didn't see her as quite pro-life enough.

Whatever one believes about the motivation behind its decision, the larger point is that Komen has no binding responsibility to allocate any part of its $93 million in grants to any organization. Komen is a nonprofit, free agent, and the good it has performed for millions of underserved women around the world is staggering.

Nevertheless, given the rabid response from abortion-rights supporters, you'd think Brinker and her organization were running puppy mills for soup vendors. Even if their real reason for ending funding is because they no longer want to be associated with an organization as politically controversial as Planned Parenthood — or even if because some of their potential donors want the relationship severed — it is inarguably their right to change course.