Los Angeles • As a minority women's health activist, Eve Sanchez Silver was proud of her work with Susan G. Komen for the Cure. The organization had almost single-handedly turned breast cancer awareness into a national cause, with its pink ribbons appearing on tote bags, containers of yogurt and even NFL football fields.

But in 2004, she learned that some of the group's local chapters gave money to Planned Parenthood to pay for breast exams for low-income women. Silver couldn't help feeling that the more money Planned Parenthood had, the more abortions its clinics could perform.

By the end of the year, she had resigned from Komen's Hispanic-Latino Advisory Committee and found a new mission: pressure Komen to cut all financial ties to Planned Parenthood.

"You cannot be a life-affirming organization in league with an organization that kills people," Silver said.

So began a slow-growing fissure between two pillars of women's health that culminated in a breach last week when it became known that Komen had decided to stop funding $680,000 in breast health services at 16 Planned Parenthood affiliates. On Friday, in the face of overwhelming public pressure, Komen reversed itself.

But it may have come too late to pull the venerable breast cancer organization out of the polarizing national debate about abortion.

The situation has been a "total embarrassment" for Komen, said Tom Madden, chief executive of TransMedia Group, a public relations and crisis management company based in Boca Raton, Fla. "I can't believe an organization like Komen wasn't aware of what was going on."

Each year, the foundation's local affiliates sponsor more than 100 fundraising runs and walks around the country. In the weeks leading up to those events, some affiliates receive calls from anti-abortion groups threatening to boycott the events and to stop frequenting the businesses that sponsor them, said John Hammarley, a former senior communications adviser at Komen who was laid off last year during a reorganization. (He says he harbors no ill will toward Komen.)

Part of Hammarley's job was helping local affiliates deal with the flare-ups. "The issue of Komen's involvement with Planned Parenthood was the single ongoing issue that caused some controversy," he said. "It was an irritation: How many calls have we gotten this month? How many people are upset?"

Churches and schools with anti-abortion beliefs also made a point of boycotting Race for the Cure events, forbidding students from forming teams, Silver said.

Eventually a small group of Komen staffers including Hammarley began discussing a strategy for managing the Planned Parenthood issue, analyzing a number of options including halting all grants to Planned Parenthood, maintaining the status quo or something in between, he said. After assessing how these alternatives could affect Komen and its affiliates, they recommended staying the course to avoid a backlash.

"Any retreat from that would have the potential of upsetting any number of populations — the affiliates, the patients or political factions," Hammarley said.

But when Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Fla., opened an inquiry in Congress in September, abortion opponents saw it as a perfect opening to press Komen. Among them, many believe, was Karen Handel, who had joined Komen about five months earlier as the organization's senior vice president for public policy.

Silver, the anti-abortion activist, said she was never convinced that Komen officials were ready to cut their ties with Planned Parenthood. Had they been serious, she said, they could have made their opposition to Planned Parenthood's abortion activities plain instead of spinning a story about technical changes to funding rules.

"Komen's ideology was still in league with Planned Parenthood," Silver said. Abortion opponents who thought they had notched a victory last week will be "very distraught and disappointed," she added.

Conservative activists had been making plans to step up fundraising on Komen's behalf, but those efforts have stopped. Silver said she would continue pressuring Komen until it made a clean break from Planned Parenthood.