Longtime Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards dies after battle with brain cancer

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Cecile Richards, a lifelong advocate for women’s rights who led Planned Parenthood for 12 years, has died at the age of 67 after a battle with brain cancer, her family said in a statement Monday morning. Richards, the eldest daughter of former Texas Gov. Ann Richards, forged her own path as an activist and political force for women across Texas and the United States.

Richards helped reshape Planned Parenthood into a political powerhouse as well as the nation’s leading provider of reproductive and sexual health care. She led the organization during a tumultuous time of attacks from Republicans, state efforts to defund the clinics and the first election of President Donald J. Trump. After leaving the organization in 2018, she remained active in Democratic politics and the fight for reproductive rights until her death.

Even after being diagnosed with glioblastoma, an incurable brain cancer in mid-2023, Richards continued pushing, helping amplify the stories of women impacted by abortion bans and working on a abortion information chatbot. She first shared her diagnosis with The Cut in January 2024.

In August, she spoke at the Democratic National Convention on behalf of Vice President Kamala Harris, saying “when women are free to make their own decisions about about their lives and to follow our dreams, we are unstoppable.” When Trump defeated Harris in November, Richards wrote on social media, “Those of us who have been at this a while have lived the truism that when you’re fighting for justice, you lose, you lose, you lose - and then you win. That’s especially true when it comes to the fight for reproductive freedom.”

Richards died at home Monday, just hours before Trump was set to be inaugurated for his second term. She was at home with her family and her dog, Ollie, according to a statement from her husband and three children.

"We invite you to put on some New Orleans jazz, gather with friends and family over a good meal, and remember something she said a lot over the last year: 'It's not hard 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," the family wrote.

President Joe Biden called Richards a "leader of utmost character," in a statement Monday.

"Carrying her mom’s torch for justice, she championed some of our Nation's most important civil rights causes. She fought for the dignity of workers, defended and advanced women's reproductive rights and equality, and mobilized our fellow Americans to exercise their power to vote," he said.

Richards was born in Waco in 1957, the eldest daughter of David, a civil rights lawyer, and Ann, a then-housewife who became increasingly involved in Democratic politics. In Dallas, Austin, and a stint in Washington, D.C., Richards was raised to fight for social justice, wearing a black armband to school to protest the war in Vietnam.

When she was 16, Richards joined her mother in campaigning for Sarah Weddington, the lawyer who argued Roe v. Wade, in her campaign for the Texas Legislature. She attended Brown University, where she “majored in history, but minored in agitating,” as she wrote in her book, and interned for an organization implementing the newly passed Title IX. She skipped walking at her college graduation to instead unfurl a “Free South Africa” banner calling on Brown to divest its financial holdings in Apartheid-era South Africa, which the university later did.

After graduation, she began working as a labor organizer across the South, where she met her husband, Kirk Adams. At age 30, she moved back to Texas to help her mother campaign to become the first female governor of Texas in modern times.

After George W. Bush defeated Gov. Richards for a second term, Cecile got involved in grassroots organizing in Texas, starting by challenging the steady conservative takeover of school boards and curriculum. She founded the Texas Freedom Alliance, which organized Texans around public education and religious liberty, and the Texas Faith Network, a group of religious leaders speaking out about the conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention. Eventually, the groups joined to become the Texas Freedom Network.

Richards went on to work for then-Democratic whip Nancy Pelosi and founded America Votes, a coalition of progressive grassroots organizations that register, educate and turn out voters. That’s where she was working when she got the call to interview to run Planned Parenthood in 2006.

"She was a critical part of ensuring that Team Pelosi stayed connected to the needs and priorities of grassroots," Pelosi said in a statement Monday. "As she ascended to other leadership roles, we never stopped working together to defend the rights of women and working families. Politics and public service were in Cecile’s DNA as the daughter of the indomitable Ann Richards – and Cecile will be remembered as a commanding leader in her own right, whose good works have improved countless lives all across the country."

Richards later described working at Planned Parenthood as a “natural extension” of the labor organizing work where she got her start.

“The same folks I organized in hotels in New Orleans, or janitors in Los Angeles, or nursing home workers in East Texas, they’re the folks that rely on Planned Parenthood, too,” she told the Brown alumni magazine in 2018. “People come to us for reproductive health care but they need a lot of other things. They need a living wage. They need child care that’s affordable. If they’re immigrants, they need us to stand with them. To me that’s the exciting thing about the organization.”

When Richards took over the organization, it was the largest provider of reproductive health care in the country. But she recalled Jill June, the director of Planned Parenthood in Iowa, telling her the organization’s real challenge lay in the political arena.

“But we keep losing ground … and we can’t count on another organization to fix it for us,” Richards recalls June telling her. “We need to get back to our movement roots.”

Over the course of 12 years, Richards helped transform Planned Parenthood into one of the most popular political institutions in the nation, growing the base of donors and volunteers from three million to 11 million. She raised more money than at any other point in the organization’s history, and reinvigorated the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, the organization’s political advocacy arm.

She ushered in an era of unity among the federation’s 49 affiliates, helping create a one-stop website for patients looking for services anywhere in the country.

But Richards’ 12 years at Planned Parenthood were also marked by some of the organization’s most difficult times, as it battled increasing attacks from conservative, anti-abortion groups. Richards’ home state of Texas led the way in “defunding” Planned Parenthood, cutting affiliated clinics out of state-funded programs for contraception, breast and cervical cancer screenings and HIV prevention.

Things came to a head in 2015, when an anti-abortion group secretly recorded and released videos appearing to show Planned Parenthood employees in California discussing the illegal sale of fetal remains. While apologizing for the employee’s tone, Richards vehemently denied that Planned Parenthood ever profited from the sale of fetal remains. In a contentious, hours-long Congressional hearing led by Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a Republican from Utah, Richards was grilled about Planned Parenthood’s spending, its strategy, and the services it provides. Congressional Republicans focused on the group’s abortion services, which are ineligible for federal funding.

That investigation, as well as subsequent congressional and state-level investigations, failed to turn up any evidence that Planned Parenthood had ever profited from the sale of fetal remains. But in many ways, the damage was done. Texas began a years-long effort to remove Planned Parenthood from the Medicaid program, which remains ongoing today, and other states followed suit.

Richards left Planned Parenthood in 2018, but remained active in Democratic politics, and especially the fight for reproductive health care. She helped found Supermajority, a group working to get more women into Democratic politics, a storytelling collective called Abortion in America, and was co-chair of American Bridge, a political action committee and opposition research group dedicated to “holding Republicans accountable.”

She also helped start Charley, an abortion chatbot that helps people in states that have banned abortion access information about medication abortion. In November 2024, Richards received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Joe Biden.

Richards is survived by her husband, Kirk Adams, a labor organizer, and her three children, Lily, Hannah and Daniel.

Planned Parenthood president and CEO Alexis McGill Johnson mourned the loss of “a giant in the fight.”

“As we continue to navigate unchartered territory, we will be able to meet the challenges we face in large part because of the movement Cecile built over decades,” McGill Johnson said in a statement. “I know, without a doubt, that Cecile would tell us the best way to honor her memory is to suit up — preferably in pink — link arms, and fight like hell for Planned Parenthood patients across the country.”

Disclosure: Planned Parenthood and Texas Freedom Network have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.