Cecile Richards, the dynamic former president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and one of the country’s most well-known defenders of abortion rights, died on Monday at her home in Manhattan. She was 67.
She was diagnosed in 2023 with glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer, her family said in a statement. A former political organizer, Ms. Richards was a daughter of former Gov. Ann Richards of Texas.
Ms. Richards was the president of Planned Parenthood from 2006 to 2018, overseeing the country’s largest provider of reproductive health care and sex education during a period in which the organization was under sharp attack by conservatives, particularly under the Republican administration of President George W. Bush and President Trump’s first. She helped fend off a raft of attempts by Republican-controlled state legislatures to pass laws to restrict access to abortion or to cut funding for it.
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Ms. Richards testified before the House Government Oversight Committee in 2015. Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, appeared on the screen. Credit…
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
“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,” Ms. Richards wrote in an opinion essay in The New York Times in 2022. “I underestimated the callousness of the Republican Party and its willingness to trade off the rights of women for political expediency.”
As the daughter of a feisty, one-term Democratic governor of Texas and a civil rights lawyer, Ms. Richards was born into activism. Before she took over Planned Parenthood in 2006, she had been a labor organizer and a founder of a get-out-the-vote organization.
In the wake of her mother’s defeat by Mr. Bush in 1994 in her bid for re-election, Ms. Richards had fought against the conservative takeover of the Texas school boards and curriculum. She served as deputy chief of staff to Representative Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, when Ms. Pelosi was named minority whip in 2001. Ms. Richards was so good at her job, Mrs. Pelosi once said, “she should be president.”
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“To me, going to Planned Parenthood was a natural extension,” Ms. Richards told a rapt audience in Nashville in 2018 while on a book tour to promote her memoir, “Make Trouble: Standing Up, Speaking Out, and Finding the Courage to Lead.” “The same folks I organized in hotels in New Orleans, or janitors in Los Angeles, or nursing home workers in East Texas, they’re the folks that rely on Planned Parenthood, too. People come to us for reproductive health care, but they need a lot of other things. They need a living wage. They need child care that’s affordable. If they’re immigrants, they need us to stand with them.”
Tall and elegant, she was an engaging, charismatic speaker. “She spoke to you, rather than at you,” the journalist and novelist Anna Quindlen said in an interview on Monday, “a kind of authenticity with a touch of Texas.”
During her 12-year-term, Ms. Richards orchestrated Planned Parenthood’s evolution into a potent political organization and the country’s largest provider of reproductive and women’s sexual health care. She grew its base of supporters and volunteers from 2.5 to 11 million. From the time President Trump was first elected in 2016, until early 2018, Planned Parenthood added 700,000 new donors, a record for so short a period.
Yet it was during her tenure that the organization became increasingly embattled, as her home state led the charge to defund Planned Parenthood, barring clinics from offering state-funded programs that included contraception, breast and cervical cancer screenings, and H.I.V. prevention. Texas finally stripped the organization of its funding altogether, resulting in the closing of hundreds of clinics.
Since 1977, under the Hyde Amendment, Congress has banned the use of federal funds for abortion, except in cases of rape or incest or to save the life of the mother. But as Ms. Richards declared over and over, abortions were a small fraction of the health-care services that Planned Parenthood affiliates provided to women, and reducing any of its funding, she said, would impact those who needed it the most.
Then, in 2015, in a sting operation set up by an anti-abortion activist, Planned Parenthood employees in California were videotaped explaining how the organization offered fetal tissue to researchers, though the activists falsely claimed that Planned Parenthood was selling the tissue for profit, which is illegal. The videos ignited a firestorm among conservatives and a contentious congressional hearing to investigate Planned Parenthood’s practices. Ms. Richards responded with a video of her own, assailing the false allegations and apologizing for the employees’ seeming lack of compassion.
In the aftermath of the videos, death threats against abortion providers and protests and violent attacks on clinics increased dramatically, according to statistics compiled by the National Abortion Foundation. The violence included the murder of three workers at a facility in Colorado Springs, where nine people were also wounded.
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Cecile Richards in Central Park in Manhattan, in 2018. She served as the president of Planned Parenthood from 2006 to 2018.Credit…
Joshua Bright for The New York Times
“I had faith that if we provided excellent health care and showed how access to reproductive rights had helped women, as well as our economy, and if we kept most of the country on our side, this, too, would pass,” she wrote in her 2022 essay. “I was wrong. As a movement, I know we couldn’t have worked any harder, but maybe we could have been tougher.”
Cecile Richards was born on July 15, 1957, in Waco, Texas, the eldest of four children, and grew up in Dallas and Austin. Her mother was a schoolteacher turned politician; her father, David Richards, was a lawyer who handled civil and voting rights cases and represented labor unions and newspapers.
“They were into politics like other couples were into bowling,” Ms. Richards told NPR in 2014. “Every movement that came through town — whether it was the farmworkers movement, the labor movement, the women’s movement — they were into, and so were all their friends.”
Cecile took to the family business with gusto. At 13, she was an honorary page to the 62nd Texas State Legislature. In ninth grade, she was disciplined by her public high school for protesting the Vietnam War, by wearing a black armband. At 16, she helped her mother campaign for Sarah Weddington, the lawyer who was co-counsel for the plaintiff in the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court case, in her successful bid for election to the Texas House of Representatives.
Ms. Richards was a history major at Brown University, graduating in 1980, though she skipped the commencement ceremony to protest the university’s investments in apartheid South Africa. Instead, she went straight to work as a labor organizer, and met her future husband, Kirk Adams, organizing hotel workers in New Orleans.
They married in 1985 and continued their union efforts in East Texas and California. When Ms. Richards’ mother began her campaign for governor, they moved to Austin to help. Ms. Richards was pregnant with twins.
She is survived by her husband; their three children, Lily, Hannah and Daniel; one grandchild; and her siblings, Ellen, Clark and Dan Richards.
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Ms. Richards attended the Women’s March on Washington on Jan. 21, 2017, a day after the first inauguration of President Trump.Credit…
Theo Wargo/Getty Images
The day after Mr. Trump’s inauguration in 2017, Ms. Richards spoke to thousands of protesters assembled for a rally billed as a Women’s March on Washington. “Today we’re here to deliver a message: We’re not going to take this lying down, and we will not go back,” she told the marchers.
The next year, she announced she was leaving Planned Parenthood to focus on mobilizing women voters.
In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, ending a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion.
“We never stopped working together to defend the rights of women and working families,” Mrs. Pelosi said in a statement Monday. “Politics and public service were in Cecile’s DNA as the daughter of the indomitable Ann Richards — and Cecile will be remembered as a commanding leader in her own right, whose good works have improved countless lives all across the country.”
When President Joseph R. Biden awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom last year, he called her “a leader of utmost character,” adding that she had “led some of our nation’s most important civil rights causes — to lift up the dignity of workers, defend and advance women’s reproductive rights and equality, and mobilize Americans to exercise their power to vote.”
At her death Ms. Richards was at work on Charley, a chatbot she co-founded last year to help abortion seekers find help, and Abortion in America, a new effort to bring greater attention to the personal experiences of people harmed by abortion bans; she used TikTok and Instagram to disseminate stories about abortion beyond traditional media.
“My mom used to say, paraphrasing Edna St. Vincent Millay, ‘Life isn’t one thing after the other; it’s the same damn thing over and over again,’” she told Jonathan Van Meter of Vogue magazine in 2017. “I think you have to realize: Just when you get sick of saying something is just when other folks are beginning to hear it.”
