On this file photograph, then-Deliberate Parenthood President Cecile Richards speaks throughout a rally opposing repeal of the Inexpensive Care Act outdoors of the Capitol Constructing on July 27, 2017 in Washington, DC.
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Cecile Richards, a distinguished advocate for girls’s rights and different progressive causes, died Monday. In an announcement, her household confirmed her demise, saying she handed away at house, “surrounded by household and her ever-loyal canine, Ollie.”
“Our hearts are damaged right now however no phrases can do justice to the enjoyment she dropped at our lives,” the assertion mentioned.
Richards was finest recognized for her work main Deliberate Parenthood by means 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 typically known 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 choice Roe v. Wade, was first elected.
On the Ladies’s March in Washington the day after Trump’s inauguration in 2017, Richards addressed hundreds of marchers and promised to struggle his insurance policies.
“At the moment we’re right here to ship a message: we’re not gonna take this mendacity down, and we won’t return,” Richards informed the gang.
The following yr, Richards introduced she was leaving Deliberate Parenthood. After leaving the group, Richards targeted her efforts on main Supermajority, a gaggle she’d co-founded to mobilize feminine voters.
Within the years to return, the Trump administration would take steps designed to scale back entry to abortion, together with reducing off funds for teams that make abortion referrals, like Deliberate Parenthood, by means 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 in the end vote to overturn many years of abortion-rights precedent.
Regardless of setbacks for the abortion rights motion and a analysis of mind most cancers, Richards embodied an “indefatigable” willpower, says former Texas State Sen. Wendy Davis.
“Her perception [was] you may’t quit earlier than you even begin, and that it is all the time price a struggle,” Davis mentioned.
Davis labored intently 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 evokes her to maintain preventing.
“You need to give in to the weariness and provides in to only giving up,” Davis mentioned. “Once I’m tempted to really feel that means, 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 recognized 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 girl?”
“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 means of their advocacy for abortion rights.
“I feel she actually modified the way in which 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 position in ensuring the Inexpensive Care Act, which handed beneath President Barack Obama, included contraceptive protection.
Murray says regardless of the setbacks the motion has confronted lately, she sees Richards for example of constant to struggle.
“I’d take what Cecile has executed in her lifetime and use it as a cost to all of us now: you progress ahead, you struggle for what you consider in, you will have the braveness to face up and say what is correct,” Murray says. “You are taking these setbacks, study from them, and transfer ahead, and he or she’s all the time executed that.”
In an Instagram submit in January 2024, months after her most cancers analysis, Richards described going by means of a whirlwind of remedies, time with household, and specializing in what was most essential — 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 not too long ago turning into a grandmother, and the challenges many ladies have confronted for the reason that overturning of Roe v. Wade.
“Sooner or later, 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 little thing we may,” 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 an announcement, 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 looking for the sunshine of equality, justice, and freedom.”
