On this file picture, then-Deliberate Parenthood President Cecile Richards speaks throughout a rally opposing repeal of the Inexpensive Care Act exterior 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 a press release, her household confirmed her dying, saying she handed away at residence, “surrounded by household and her ever-loyal canine, Ollie.”
“Our hearts are damaged immediately however no phrases can do justice to the enjoyment she delivered to our lives,” the assertion mentioned.
Richards was greatest 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 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 resolution 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 battle 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 following 12 months, 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 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 Courtroom, who, in June of 2022, would in the end 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 surrender earlier than you even begin, and that it is all the time value a battle,” 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 combating.
“You wish to give in to the weariness and provides in to simply 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 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 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 example of continuous to battle.
“I might take what Cecile has accomplished in her lifetime and use it as a cost to all of us now: you progress ahead, you battle for what you consider in, you have got 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 accomplished that.”
In an Instagram publish in January 2024, months after her most cancers prognosis, Richards described going by means of a whirlwind of therapies, 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 lately changing into a grandmother, and the challenges many ladies have confronted because the 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, all the things 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 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 looking for the sunshine of equality, justice, and freedom.”