On January 20, Cecile Richards—activist, organizer and former president of Planned Parenthood—passed away at her home after a battle with brain cancer. Her family stated: “This morning our beloved Cecile passed away at home, surrounded by her family and her ever-loyal dog, Ollie. Our hearts are broken today but no words can do justice to the joy she brought to our lives.”
Richards served as the president of Planned Parenthood and Planned Parenthood Action Fund from 2006 to 2018. During two time periods in which abortion was most under attack in the United States (the George W. Bush administration and first Donald Trump presidency), she fought anti-abortion legislation and advocated for legislative protections for pregnant people.
“The reason I took this job,” she told The Washington Post at the time, “is I feel like we need to go into the 21st century. Clearly, with some folks in the country, we’re going to get there kicking and screaming.”
Although she may be known best for her incredibly influential role at Planned Parenthood, Richards has been a leading force in the political and social justice spaces for decades. After working as a labor organizer following her graduation from Brown in 1980, she worked for her mother Ann Richards’s gubernatorial campaign in Texas, who made history as the second of only two female governors in the state. Then, in 1995, Richards founded the Texas Freedom Network, a nonpartisan social justice organization.
After leading Planned Parenthood for 12 years and on the heels of Hillary Clinton’s groundbreaking run for president, Richards cofounded Supermajority, a nonpartisan organization “focused on making women the most powerful voting bloc in the country.” Following the fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022, she cofounded Abortion in America, a platform that features the real abortion stories of people in America and “shows the impact of abortion bans on people’s lives.”
In November of last year, Richards was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Biden. At the private ceremony at The White House, Biden said that Richards “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.”
I had the honor of interviewing Richards many times over the years. I was always struck by her resilience, dedication to fighting for reproductive and women’s rights in this country and her commitment to the legacy of activism that her mother left behind. Following her 2023 glioblastoma diagnosis, she remained involved in politics and helped cast Texas’s ceremonial votes for Kamala Harris at the DNC last August and spoke at the event as well. “One day, our children and grandchildren may ask us, ‘When it was all on the line, what did you do?’ And the only acceptable answer is, ‘Everything we could,’” she said in her speech about the importance of fighting for reproductive healthcare.
As a way to honor Richards’s life, leadership and legacy, I’ve shared below some of the most inspiring quotes from my interviews with her. I hope we can keep her spirit and immense wisdom in mind in the coming years as we work to protect and advance the causes she championed throughout her life. As Richards wrote in her 2018 book, Make Trouble: Standing Up, Speaking Out, and Finding the Courage to Lead, “Just don’t forget: to make a difference, you have to make a little trouble.”
“It's not anyone else's responsibility but our own to make sure that women are not only able to be astronauts and athletes and everything else, but that they also hold the highest government positions in the land. I'll never forget my very first few months here at Planned Parenthood: I went to the Supreme Court, we had a major case to argue, and sitting there in the audience and seeing this tiny, fierce woman, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, was literally holding on her shoulders the entire population of women in this country. And, of course, it was a choice issue, so she was trying to represent all of us. And it was so stunning to realize how other disenfranchised groups have felt all their lives of not being represented in the highest court in the land. There is a lot more that we have to do, but a lot of opportunity, and it's up to us to do it.”
“I think one of the major obstacles we face is that we keep thinking there's going to be a perfect moment where someone is going to come to us and say, ‘Wow, you would be perfect to run for the United States Senate,’ or, ‘I really think we should put you forward for State House or to become Governor.’ We think there's a perfect moment in which our children will be the right age, we’ll have all the correct degrees, know the right people, will have had all the correct experiences—and that simply isn't how life works. And as women, we're so caught up in doing everything right that I think we are sort of pre-conditioned to wait for the perfect time and it just doesn't happen. The most important thing to learn is to just say ‘yes.’ Whenever the next opportunity comes to you, don't think about whether you have the right clothes or you have the right degree, just say ‘yes.’”
“I can just tell you from the very narrow perch that I sit on, which is in the arena of women's health, the classic example was the debate over healthcare and whether or not maternity benefits would be covered by health insurance. We had members of the United States Senate arguing against it because they were never going to need maternity benefits. It's as fundamental as that. Perhaps the most unique thing about women is that we reproduce, we have children. It sort of an essential part of humanity, and yet, when you don't have women in the room making fundamental decisions about women's health and reproduction, then all the joys and challenges that happen once you do have children, childcare and healthcare for kids, and education—it's critical that you have women debating these policies and representing that point of view. I could give you countless examples in the Affordable Care Act where if it had not been for Senator Barbara Mikulski or Senator Debbie Stabenow, I could go down the list, that bill would look radically different. And it is in large measure because of the women in Congress, and I include Leader Nancy Pelosi in this as well, that women's health made such an advance in this bill. It simply wouldn't have happened otherwise.”
“There are systemic things we need in this country. First and foremost, we need a commitment to equal pay—that regardless of your gender, you get paid for the work that you do. We all know the numbers, and of course it’s more profound for women of color in terms of unequal access to pay. We need maternity care and childcare that is available for everyone, regardless of where they work. We need paid family leave, like every other industrialized country, and we need paid sick leave. These are fundamental policy changes. What we want is to put these issues at the top of the list, not at the bottom of the list. Because they’re not only good for women—they’re good for families and they’re good for the economy… It’s important just to make sure that we don’t lose sight of our own power collectively to change this country and to change public policy for the good.”
“The more that women understand the power of actually participating in the voting process, the more it ignites them. An important thing we can do is to make sure that women feel not only empowered by having the information they need and understanding where candidates stand on the issues, but literally having the ability to vote.
I think, not in a partisan way, in a way that women are recognizing that we’re the ones we’ve been waiting for. No one is going to change this but us. And I think the exciting thing right now is the opportunity for women across race, across economic experience, across geography, to actually band together and say, ‘We believe in the same things, and that’s what we expect from our government.’ I think there’s never been a more powerful opportunity.”
“It is all about women taking their power and asserting it. I think power is something you have to take and use. It's just not given to you. I've been an organizer my entire life. The only thing you get is what you fight for and nothing more. I come out of an activist tradition and just believe that and every day we have to push forward. Don't be patient and don't wait for someone to ask you and don't think everyone's going to like you, because if you're not pissing someone off, you're probably not doing your job! And that's how change happens, because people are bold and audacious. We've just got to be willing to make more people uncomfortable and push for the power that we deserve.”
“I started really as an organizer back in the labor movement, in the early days, organizing garment workers. So I spent most of my time trying to help folks, work with folks to help themselves, frankly, to get a better lot in life. And I think that I learned early on—and it's something I hope that I carry on, but some days it's hard—to really listen to folks and understand where they're coming from. And certainly when you're organizing low-wage workers, it's trying to understand their struggles and what their lives are like. I'm very proud of that work, but really proud, frankly, of the work that our folks do every day at Planned Parenthood to help with young people and women who often really have no other healthcare provider to turn to, and to make sure that what we're doing is actually helping them in whatever their situation is.
I am privileged to have one of the most amazing jobs. I organized low-wage workers for many, many years—women who had no options. The one option they had was to fight for something better than the job that they had. So I live every day with the understanding that I am enormously privileged to be able to not only to have a living and have a job, but to every day go and do something that is extremely important and rewarding. So I feel like I live in a rarefied world, and that's what keeps me going.”
This article originally appeared at ForbesWomen.
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Marianne Schnall is a widely-published interviewer and journalist and author of What Will It Take to Make a Woman President?, Leading the Way, and Dare to Be You: Inspirational Advice for Girls. She is also the founder of Feminist.com and What Will It Take Movements and the host of the podcast ShiftMakers.
You can find out more about her work and writings at www.marianneschnall.com.