Cecile Richards, the former president of Planned Parenthood who helped turn the reproductive healthcare giant into a formidable political organization and make support for abortion rights a virtual requirement for Democratic candidates, died on Monday after a battle with brain cancer. She was 67.
“This morning our beloved Cecile passed away at home, surrounded by her family and her ever-loyal dog, Ollie,” Richards’ family wrote in a statement. “Our hearts are broken today but no words can do justice to the joy she brought to our lives.”
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.
Under her watch, Planned Parenthood became a mainstay in Democratic politics, battled numerous congressional attempts to defund the organization, and tried to dam a torrent of state-level efforts to restrict abortion access.
Her mother, the former Texas governor Ann Richards, was a political legend, but Richards herself became a household name in 2015, after anti-abortion activists released secret recordings of Planned Parenthood workers purportedly discussing the sale of fetal tissue. The recordings – which Planned Parenthood said were doctored – spurred multiple congressional and state investigations that could not substantiate their contents, and led US House Republicans to grill Richards in an hours-long, highly publicized hearing.
After stepping down from Planned Parenthood in 2018, Richards went on to found Supermajority, an organization dedicated to championing women’s leadership. After the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022 – in a case involving the kind of state-level abortion restrictions that Richards tried to defeat – Richards started Charley, a bot to help abortion seekers get accurate information about the procedure, and Abortion in America, a campaign to publicize stories of post-Roe abortions. In late 2024, Joe Biden awarded Richards the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the US.
“One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned as a lifelong organizer is that there are no permanent wins and no permanent losses. We have to fight for every inch of progress, and we can’t take anything for granted,” Richards wrote on Instagram after receiving the honor.
“That’s especially true in challenging moments like the one we find ourselves in now. But what a joy and a privilege it is to be part of the long struggle to make our country a fairer and more hopeful place.”
Richards was born on 15 July 1957, in Waco, Texas, and was primarily raised in Dallas and Austin. Her political involvement began early in life, as her parents were ardent progressives.
“They were into politics like other couples were into bowling,” Richards told NPR in 2014. “Every movement that came through town, whether it was the farm workers, the labor movement, the women’s movement, they were into and so were all their friends.”
After graduating from Brown University, Richards started working as a labor organizer in Louisiana, where she met her husband, Kirk Adams, who went on to hold leadership positions at the powerful Service Employees International Union. The couple had three children together.
Ahead of the 1990 election, the family moved back to Texas to help Ann Richards run for governor. Known for her silvery, sky-high hair and acerbic wit – during her address at the 1988 Democratic National Convention, Richards famously declared that Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, “just backwards and in high heels” – Richards eked out a narrow victory, thanks to a coalition of female voters and voters of color. She then lost her 1994 re-election campaign (to future US president George W Bush), but remained Cecile Richards’ political north star for the rest of Cecile’s life. A chapter of Cecile Richards’ best-selling 2018 memoir, Make Trouble, is titled: “What Would Ann Richards Do?”
After Ann Richards’ gubernatorial loss, Cecile attended a 1995 Texas state board of education meeting, where she watched rightwing activists crusade against providing students with information about sex education and LGBTQ+ rights. Struck by the religious right’s rising power, Richards founded Texas Freedom Network, one of the most prominent progressive advocacy organizations in the Lone Star State.
Richards later moved to Washington DC, where she served as Nancy Pelosi’s deputy chief of staff before helping to found and lead the voting rights coalition America Votes.
The Planned Parenthood Federation of America hired Richards as president in 2006. Two years later, the non-profit endorsed Barack Obama for president. It was only the second time in the group’s 85-year history that it had endorsed a candidate for president, but it heralded Planned Parenthood’s increased commitment to electoral politics – a hallmark of Richards’ time at its helm.
By greatly expanding Planned Parenthood’s fundraising and state-level organizing, especially in the face of repeated Republican efforts to defund it, Richards made it into an organization that could corral votes as well as make or break political candidates. After 2010, when Democrats’ inter-party arguing over abortion coverage nearly defeated the Affordable Care Act, Planned Parenthood worked to turn support for abortion rights into a key plank in the Democratic party platform. Today, there is just one anti-abortion Democrat in Congress.
After being diagnosed with brain cancer in 2023, Richards continued to work on leftwing causes. She co-chaired American Bridge 21st Century, a Democratic network that includes a formidable Super Pac, and spoke at the 2024 Democratic National Convention in support of Kamala Harris. Alongside Kate Cox, a Texan woman who sued after being denied a medically necessary abortion, Richards cast Texas’s ceremonial votes in support of Harris.
In their statement, Richards’ family said that those who wished to honor Richards’ memory should keep in mind something she frequently said over the last year of her life: “It’s hard not 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.’”
