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 outstanding advocate for ladies’s rights and different progressive causes, died Monday. In a press release, her household confirmed her demise, saying she handed away at dwelling, “surrounded by household and her ever-loyal canine, Ollie.”
“Our hearts are damaged at this time however no phrases can do justice to the enjoyment she delivered to our lives,” the assertion mentioned.
Richards was greatest identified for her work main Deliberate Parenthood by 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 known as upon to defend the reproductive well being group towards 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 resolution 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 combat his insurance policies.
“Right this moment we’re right here to ship a message: we’re not gonna take this mendacity down, and we is not going to return,” Richards informed the group.
The subsequent yr, Richards introduced she was leaving Deliberate Parenthood. After leaving the group, Richards targeted her efforts on main Supermajority, a bunch she’d co-founded to mobilize feminine voters.
Within the years to come back, 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 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 Courtroom, 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 prognosis of mind most cancers, Richards embodied an “indefatigable” willpower, says former Texas State Sen. Wendy Davis.
“Her perception [was] you’ll be able to’t quit earlier than you even begin, and that it is at all times value a combat,” 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 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 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 elements. Deliberate Parenthood mentioned the sting movies have 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 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 below President Barack Obama, included contraceptive protection.
Murray says regardless of the setbacks the motion has confronted lately, she sees Richards for instance of continuous to combat.
“I might take what Cecile has performed in her lifetime and use it as a cost to all of us now: you progress ahead, you combat for what you imagine in, you may have the braveness to face up and say what is true,” Murray says. “You’re taking these setbacks, study from them, and transfer ahead, and he or she’s at all times performed that.”
In an Instagram submit in January 2024, months after her most cancers prognosis, Richards described going by a whirlwind of remedies, time with household, and specializing in what was most vital — together with her continued activism.
“In spite of everything,” 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 lately changing into a grandmother, and the challenges many ladies have confronted because the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
“At some point, our kids and grandchildren could ask us, ‘When it was all on the road, what did you do?’ And the one acceptable reply is, every little thing 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.”
