The enormous support shown for Planned Parenthood this past week has been a big, beautiful bright spot in what has been a troubling period of assault on women's rights and women's health.

First there's been the conflict between the Obama administration and the Catholic Church over health-care coverage. The administration is insisting that health-insurance plans provided by hospitals and universities owned by religious institutions must include coverage of contraception and sterilization. For the president and his advisers, this couldn't have been an easy decision. To the Catholic Church, preventing pregnancy is morally wrong, so providing insurance that covers pregnancy prevention is morally wrong.

But Obama made the right choice. By opposing contraception, the Church is asking women to bear children whether they want to or not, whether they can afford to or not, whether they are physically and emotionally able to or not. And while pregnancy can be a wonderful condition, it can also be a dangerous, life-threatening condition.

(And by the way: three of the Republican presidential candidates - Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum - have sided with the Church, insisting that Obama is violating religious rights guaranteed by the Constitution. Santorum, according to a recent New York Times article, goes further, saying he wants states to have the right to ban birth control.)

As the contraception controversy heated up, a second firestorm broke out: the Komen for the Cure Foundation's decision to stop giving money to Planned Parenthood for breast-cancer screening.

Fortunately, when the Komen Foundation news broke, Planned Parenthood supporters rallied, big time, flooding the agency with funding and sending protests to the Komen Foundation.

Earlier today, the foundation backed down. It will restore the funding.

That will help Planned Parenthood - but for many of us, it will not restore faith in the Komen Foundation.

And there's additional plus to the Komen controversy: a clear demonstration to politicians of all parties that the issue of women's rights has plenty of supporters - as does Planned Parenthood.