On this file photograph, then-Deliberate Parenthood President Cecile Richards speaks throughout a rally opposing repeal of the Reasonably priced Care Act exterior of the Capitol Constructing on July 27, 2017 in Washington, DC.
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Cecile Richards, a outstanding advocate for girls’s rights and different progressive causes, died Monday. In a press release, her household confirmed her dying, saying she handed away at dwelling, “surrounded by household and her ever-loyal canine, Ollie.”
“Our hearts are damaged at present however no phrases can do justice to the enjoyment she dropped at our lives,” the assertion mentioned.
Richards was greatest identified for her work main Deliberate Parenthood by way of a very difficult time which included threats to its funding and the primary election of Donald Trump to the presidency.
Throughout greater than a decade on the helm of Deliberate Parenthood, Richards was usually referred to as upon to defend the reproductive well being group in opposition to assaults from political opponents. She and her motion confronted mounting challenges after Trump, who ran for President in 2016 on a promise to overturn the landmark abortion rights determination Roe v. Wade, was first elected.
On the Ladies’s March in Washington the day after Trump’s inauguration in 2017, Richards addressed 1000’s of marchers and promised to struggle his insurance policies.
“At this time we’re right here to ship a message: we’re not gonna take this mendacity down, and we won’t return,” Richards informed the group.
The subsequent yr, Richards introduced she was leaving Deliberate Parenthood. After leaving the group, Richards centered her efforts on main Supermajority, a bunch she’d co-founded to mobilize feminine voters.
Within the years to return, the Trump administration would take steps designed to cut back entry to abortion, together with chopping off funds for teams that make abortion referrals, like Deliberate Parenthood, by way of an overhaul of the Title X household planning program.
Over the course of his first time period, Trump named three conservative justices to the Supreme Court docket, who, in June of 2022, would finally vote to overturn a long time of abortion-rights precedent.
Regardless of setbacks for the abortion rights motion and a prognosis of mind most cancers, Richards embodied an “indefatigable” dedication, says former Texas State Sen. Wendy Davis.
“Her perception [was] you may’t hand over earlier than you even begin, and that it is at all times value a struggle,” Davis mentioned.
Davis labored carefully with Richards throughout a high-profile battle to defeat an anti-abortion invoice in Texas in 2013. Now a senior advisor to Deliberate Parenthood Texas Votes, the group’s political arm in Texas, Davis says Richards nonetheless conjures up her to maintain preventing.
“You need to give in to the weariness and provides in to simply giving up,” Davis mentioned. “After I’m tempted to really feel that manner, I take into consideration Cecile, and I do know lots of people do.”
Richards herself drew inspiration from the legacy of her mom, the late Texas Gov. Ann Richards, who was identified for her sharp wit and down-to-earth demeanor.
Throughout a listening to earlier than the Home Committee on Oversight and Authorities Reform in 2015, a male lawmaker requested her if she anticipated the committee “to be simpler on you since you’re a lady?”
“Completely not,” Richards responded. “That is not how my mama raised me.”
The listening to stemmed from the discharge of secretly-recorded movies by the Heart for Medical Progress, an anti-abortion group that accused Deliberate Parenthood of promoting fetal physique components. Deliberate Parenthood mentioned the sting movies had been edited to be intentionally deceptive.
Dr. Colleen McNicholas, Chief Medical Officer at Deliberate Parenthood Nice Rivers within the St. Louis space, knew Richards for greater than a decade by way of their advocacy for abortion rights.
“I believe she actually modified the best way that the motion engaged publicly; she was a really seen and daring presence,” McNicholas says. “She wasn’t afraid to take questions, to say the phrase ‘abortion.'”
Washington Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat with an extended historical past of advocacy for reproductive rights, credit Richards with an instrumental function in ensuring the Reasonably priced Care Act, which handed below President Barack Obama, included contraceptive protection.
Murray says regardless of the setbacks the motion has confronted in recent times, she sees Richards for instance of constant to struggle.
“I’d take what Cecile has completed in her lifetime and use it as a cost to all of us now: you progress ahead, you struggle for what you imagine in, you will have the braveness to face up and say what is true,” Murray says. “You are taking these setbacks, be taught from them, and transfer ahead, and she or he’s at all times completed that.”
In an Instagram publish in January 2024, months after her most cancers prognosis, Richards described going by way of a whirlwind of therapies, time with household, and specializing in what was most necessary — together with her continued activism.
“In any case,” Richards wrote, “as my mom used to say: ‘Why ought to your life be nearly you?'”
As her well being continued to say no, Richards addressed the 2024 Democratic Nationwide Conference.
She spoke of the enjoyment of just lately changing into a grandmother, and the challenges many ladies have confronted for the reason that overturning of Roe v. Wade.
“Someday, our kids and grandchildren might ask us, ‘When it was all on the road, what did you do?’ And the one acceptable reply is, every part we might,” Richards mentioned.
In November 2024, President Joe Biden honored Cecile Richards with the Presidential Medal of Freedom throughout a non-public ceremony on the White Home. In a press release, Biden praised Richards for her “absolute braveness and conviction” and “an inspiring legacy that endures in her unbelievable household, the numerous lives she has made higher, and a Nation in search of the sunshine of equality, justice, and freedom.”
