Cecile Richards, a prominent advocate for abortion rights who served as president of Planned Parenthood for more than a decade, died on Monday. She was 67.
Richards was diagnosed with glioblastoma, a terminal brain cancer, in 2023. She died at home, "surrounded by family and her ever-loyal dog, Ollie," Richards’ family said in a statement.
Her passing came hours before Donald Trump was inaugurated as president. Trump appointed three Supreme Court justices who provided a conservative majority to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022, ending federal protections for abortion rights throughout the U.S.
Richards was perhaps best known for leading Planned Parenthood; from 2006 to 2018, she was the organization’s president, the longest amount of time any individual led the organization. Her tenure started during the second administration of President George W. Bush and ended during Trump’s first administration. As the national fight over abortion access intensified in the mid 2010s, Richards often served as the public face for abortion rights.
During her time at the organization, Richards fought off attacks on abortion funding from Republican-led state legislatures; in 2022, she described the previous 20 years as “a turning point in the fight for access to abortion” in an essay for The New York Times.
She was the daughter of former Texas Gov. Ann Richards, a Democrat who served from 1991 to 1995 and died in 2006. In 2013, Cecile Richards joined protesters in the state Capitol building “yelling at the top of their lungs” to try to block a restrictive abortion bill that eventually passed.
Richards left her post at Planned Parenthood in 2018 and spent her remaining years working to improve information and access around reproductive care. In November, former President Joe Biden presented Richards with the Medal of Freedom. In a private ceremony, Biden said that Richards had “led some of our nation’s most important civil rights causes — to lift up the dignity of workers, defend and advance women’s reproductive rights and equality, and mobilize Americans to exercise their power to vote.”
Last summer, New York Magazine spoke with Richards about her continued fight for abortion access amid her own health battle. At the time, she’d recently launched Abortion in America, a website where individuals who have sought abortion care after Roe’s overturning can share their stories. She also worked to launch Charley, an AI chatbot that provides information on where people can access abortions.
“So many people I’ve worked with and organized, nursing-home workers and hotel workers and janitors, they didn’t have any options,” Richards told the magazine. “But I have been one of the really privileged few that could do what I thought needed doing. And so whatever comes next, I have that.”
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