Ten days before the 2016 election, I was standing in a cinderblock room in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, with Cecile Richards and other leaders of prominent women’s groups, all of us out to make the case for Hillary Clinton’s historic run for President. A jubilant crowd packed the town square waiting for the show to start, but Hillary was running late.
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It turned out there was a good reason. FBI Director James Comey had just sent his infamous letter to Congress reopening the official investigation into Hillary’s emails, throwing the election into turmoil in the home stretch. Hillary and her top advisers were huddling on the plane, trying to figure out how to weather this one last blow.
The mood backstage was anxious–but not Cecile. Elegant and perfectly coiffed as always, she posed for selfies, cracked jokes, and calmed the nerves of the stream of volunteers who strained to get close enough to bask for a moment in her effervescent shine. Cecile’s optimism and sense of purpose were infectious, and she saw every stop and disruption as a chance to enlist more recruits in the fight for more health care, more access to information, more freedom.
Once the rally finally started, Cecile’s speech–punctuated with off-the-cuff jokes–drew a standing ovation. Afterward, we all decamped to a local bar where Cecile proceeded to transform it into a war room leading the pushback against the resurfaced claims of improperly handled email servers. That was Cecile in a nutshell: equal parts beloved doyenne and four-star general inspiring the people to take on the causes she loved. Cecile, who died Monday at 67 after a battle with brain cancer, loved a lot of people, and boy, did the people love her.
I first knew of Cecile Richards because of her mom. The first election cycle I was old enough to vote, I voted for Ann Richards for governor of Texas. Pulling the lever for Ann made my young Texan feminist heart flutter. Two decades later, I found myself almost speechless sitting across a table from her daughter at a downtown D.C. eatery. Cecile was the president of Planned Parenthood, and I had recently assumed the position of president of NARAL Pro-Choice American (now Reproductive Freedom for All). Cecile had taken me out to lunch to congratulate me, read the newbie into the movement strategy and–as I later learned–to induct me into a sisterhood of women who left perfectly respectable careers to instead fight for abortion rights.
Cecile cut her teeth on union organizing. She often spoke of “cutting turf”–dividing up which houses to visit–with her husband Kirk, sitting at their kitchen table late at night. Cecile had worked in the legendary Nancy Pelosi’s office on the Hill, learning the ins and outs of legislative policy. She was the founding president of the cutting-edge civic-engagement organization, America Votes. I know from experience that at that time, with that pedigree, many would have warned Cecile off the Planned Parenthood job. Moving into women’s rights, and especially abortion rights, was seen as a voluntary demotion for a powerhouse woman who could write her own ticket.
Cecile never flinched. She occupied the position with a zealousness of a missionary and the certainty of an oracle. Her aggressive warnings about the state of abortion care were dismissed by some as hysterical and shrill before becoming apparently prescient as the attacks on reproductive health care ramped up in President Obama’s second term. Cecile had a knack for turning attacks into opportunities. When the Susan G. Komen foundation announced they would defund Planned Parenthood because it provided abortions to patients, Cecile unleashed a juggernaut of fundraising that would grow the organization’s profile and bolster its resources for the wars to come. The summer I had my twins, schooled in the lead-up by Cecile who had born her own twins years prior, Cecile was hauled to testify before Congress. I remember watching on TV while feeding my babies as an always-prepared Cecile stoically answered every cynical question, defending Planned Parenthood against politically trumped-up charges of doctored video footage. In 12 hours of relentless interrogation, she became a hero in the raging war of political disinformation, refusing to yield an inch that might jeopardize patients’ access to life-changing care.
Cecile was also complicated. We collaborated, but we also fought. Like any good warrior, she liked to get her way and didn’t mind sparring to get her point across. She could dispatch an adversary with a cool glance and a shrugged shoulder. But her internal compass was always set to justice, and when the joust was over, she was likely to chuckle and invite you out for a glass of wine, her eyes twinkling as she set sights on the bigger battles that she relished. As the reality of the post-Dobbs environment settled over the country, many mourned and shrank from the Herculean task of finding ways to support people who needed abortion care in an increasingly hostile environment. Not Cecile. She doubled down developing Charley the chatbot, always ready to dispense medically accurate information. Even as her own health began to wane, Cecile was often imploring donors to give more and politicians to care more. She knew the stakes, and she would fight to the end.
Cecile Richards leaves a legacy of fearless service and a shining example for future generations of young women to follow.
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