Cecile Richards, former president of Planned Parenthood, dies at 67
Texas-born activist who spent lifetime advocating for abortion rights died after a battle with brain cancer…Over the course of her career, Richards became one of the biggest faces of US abortion rights, if not one of the most important American activists of the 21st century.
“When women are free to make their own decisions about their lives and to follow our dreams, we are unstoppable,” she said in the August 21 speech. “But when Roe v. Wade was overturned, a generation of young people lost that freedom.”
It was Richards’ work at Planned Parenthood, which she helmed from 2006 to 2018, the second-longest time any individual has run the organization, that catapulted her into the national spotlight.
Richards’ tenure came as anti-abortion efforts hit a fever pitch, overlapping with attempts by Republican-led state legislatures to pass laws that could restrict access to abortion and cut funding to reproductive health providers, including in her home state of Texas. Years later, she would describe the period as “a turning point in the fight for access to abortion.”
“If I have one regret from my time leading Planned Parenthood, it is that we believed that providing vital health care, with public opinion on our side, would be enough to overcome the political onslaught,” she wrote in the 2022 piece.
More recently, she told The 19th she believed it would be years before the country might restore abortion rights.
“In all honesty, I fear it will take us a long time to restore the rights we once had,” she said. “For people who face challenges based on race, geography, income, and more, these inequities are deep-seated, intersectional and much more difficult to eradicate. We need to be ready for a multi-year fight.”
If you’d like to celebrate Cecile today, we invite you to put on some New Orleans jazz, gather with friends and family over a good meal, and remember something she said a lot over the last year: “It’s not hard to imagine future generations one day asking: ‘When there was so much at stake for our country, what did you do?’ The only acceptable answer is: ‘Everything we could!'”
I am alive because of Cecile and her tireless fight for women to control their own bodies… their very lives. Such a concept. An abortion saved my life TWICE: I almost died bleeding from a ruptured ectopic pregnancy in 2007 only to lose a pregnancy in the second semester in 2008 whose fetus would not leave my body, thus risking my life. If I lived in a state that outlawed abortion I would be dead. But then that is what antiabortion people know and actually want, they just don’t say it out loud. Well, some do. The Christians who believe women are chattel and only good for serving man and reproducing for him, willingly sign death warrants of thousands of women and call it God’s will because ‘pro-life’ -there is no such thing as pro-life. There is only antiabortion and power and control. It is almost as if they know women don’t need men, so they have to control them and make laws against their very lives- trying to make them bend at the knee. The immense hatred of women has been not taken seriously enough. It needs to be. Women need to control their OWN bodies, and thus their lives.
May her memory forever be a blessing. Rest well Cecile. Thank you.
