Cecile Richards Never Gave Up the Fight

It was a sticky June day last summer in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and lifelong organizer and reproductive rights activist Cecile Richards was in her element. At an abortion storytelling event she had spearheaded in response to Louisiana’s near total abortion ban, she listened to, encouraged, and thanked woman after woman who shared their experiences.

Richards, who transformed Planned Parenthood during her 12-year tenure as president, also helped arrange snacks and move chairs. And when the daughter of a local activist arrived, Richards opened her arms and the girl sprinted into them, wrapping her arms around her legs.

Richards, who died on Monday at age 67, was a powerful champion for reproductive justice, a bestselling author and public thinker. She was one of the most powerful political figures in the US. But one of her greatest powers—one I got to witness over four days in New Orleans last year—was how she connected with people. She would sit chatting with a group of strangers like they were old friends, frequently talking about her three kids and beloved toddler grandson, Teddy. She and her husband, Kirk Adams, invited everyone involved in the storytelling project over to her house one night to eat cheese and drink wine.

I only knew Richards briefly, but I will never forget her easy presence, her optimism, and her belief that the world can be better if we all work together.

Back in June 2024, Glamour was invited to witness the beginning of the abortion storytelling project (now called Abortion in America) she created with her longtime collaborator, Lauren Peterson and local abortion activist Kaitlyn Joshua (who would be named a Glamour Woman of the Year in 2024. Richards herself was honored as a WOTY in 2015).

Richards embarked on the project shortly after learning, in 2023, that she had glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer that has a median survival rate of less than a year. After her diagnosis, Richards turned her attention to a battle with multiple fronts. She’d fly down to Louisiana for a few days to work on the abortion storytelling project, then fly home to New York for treatment. She was fighting for herself, and fighting for us. And she never stopped.

During my four days in Louisiana, I had a chance to sit down and speak with Cecile at length. Part of me wanted to pick her brain; to have a chance to receive some of her enthusiasm and hope by osmosis. But also to understand why, and how, in the face of a devastating diagnosis she continued to fight for the rights of others. No one would have blamed her if she retired from public life to focus on her illness, but she poured herself into the work with even more fervor. How did she do it? How did she keep going?

Richards’ answer was simple yet profound: how can we not?

“I feel so lucky,” she said on that sweltering June day in Baton Rouge. “I’m fortunate to be able to do anything at this point that helps build constituencies and encourages young women.”

In honor of her life and legacy, here below is our full conversation, and Cecile in her own words. It’s been lightly edited and condensed for readability.

Cecile Richards with her daughter, Hannah Adams, in June.

Emily Kask

Stephanie McNeal: When I got the opportunity to come report on this project, I was excited about being here in person in particular, because I wanted to witness what was happening on the ground. I think women who don’t live in these places where abortion is banned, we understand it on an intellectual level, but we don’t understand it on a visceral level. We can’t imagine it.

Cecile Richards: How could you imagine it?

Right, it’s hard for any of us to understand. I was born and raised in California, now I live in New York. I haven’t experienced losing my rights. You’re someone who has split your life between New York and DC, which are blue, very progressive places, but you’re from the South. You chose to move back to the South. What do you think people don’t understand about this region?

There’s just such a vibrant community of people who are working on making the South more progressive and are doing it in a way that is very community-based. The resilience of women to me in these parts is amazing. There’s a long history of women and fighting back. To see what’s happened in Louisiana and other states; you see the doctors, and the activists, see the community leaders, and certainly the patients and hear what they’ve experienced. The power of women is just undeniable.

Yet, there’s disproportionately gendered representation in politics. I’ve been thinking, I would just like to box up a carton of these women and their stories and have them travel the countryside because they’re so compelling. People read about it, but it certainly sometimes feels like another world.

What I really feel strongly about too, these women don’t want pity, don’t want to hear, oh, bless their hearts. They’re stronger than most people in blue states because they’re up against it. I want to see people viewing these communities as sparks of resilience and hope as opposed to people to feel sorry for because they live in the South. I’d love to change that perception.

Everything has become so polarized, and I feel a result of that is this feeling among coastal liberals of, who needs these red states? Let’s just chop ’em off and start our own country. Or people who say to red state liberals, why don’t you just move out of the South?

People have been here for generations. People say, well, you can just leave and get healthcare somewhere else. There’s people that we are talking to who’ve never left the state of Louisiana or Texas, and they shouldn’t have to. I think our experience has been that people are committed to the state for a reason. It’s important to support them and be allied with them in the fights ahead.

Abortion rights, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Now we’re seeing things like the 10 Commandments in classrooms, the attacks on transgender people, on LGBT folks, the criminalization of young people, and increasing incarceration. So it’s just one of a series of issues that we are going to have to fight back on. I keep feeling we’ve hit bottom, but maybe not yet.

I worry we have not.

Yeah, but we will.

What made you buy a house in Louisiana after leaving Planned Parenthood? What is it about the South you love so much?

I started out here as an organizer with my now-husband. We were trying to organize hotel workers because they were paid the minimum wage, and most of them were housekeepers and women working two jobs. I saw the same fight back then as I’m seeing now. It’s funny, New Orleans and Louisiana is a place where people live and let live and have an attitude of everything’s going to be okay. Yet, women in this state continually fight back.

It’s a place where it wasn’t always this partisan and it’s a reflection of the country writ large, similarly to Texas. It’s like people have lost the ability to get information and news and hear about what’s going on. And as the Republican party, in my opinion, has just become captive to the most extreme points of view, and they’ve lost their voice.

I wanted to come back here because it’s a state worth fighting for. It’s such a misunderstood part of the country. And again, as you said, people kind of dismiss it, like what are those people thinking? Yet there’s good people every day who are waking up, and figuring out what they can do to make a difference. I wanted to be back at the grassroots and I want to be back doing what I can to support people making change.

You’ve been working for months to find abortion storytellers, and then this week they all gathered to share what they’ve been through and try to enact change. What has it been like to see this project come to fruition?

On Friday night, we hosted all the storytellers in a sweaty dining room in my house. There were folks from many different walks of life, but all committed to the same principles in one room. It felt like this is what I want to be part of. If I can play any small role in bringing people together from different walks of life and lifting them up…you could just see in that room people feeding off of each other and feeling supported.

That’s what organizing is. If we can do anything to give people a voice and a platform then they’re going to get this done. That was my experience at Planned Parenthood. If you could find people that wanted to make a difference and give them support, and particularly young people like Kait [Joshua], no telling what she can do with her life. It takes all of these pieces, but that spark, you just don’t know where it’s going to come from.

[Abortion activist] Nancy Davis told me when we first started working together that most people find their calling, but my calling found me. People get energy from other people and they are encouraged to do things that they probably never thought they could do, and who knows when the switch flips. But I’ve seen it so many times. It’s funny, this is unrelated, but when my mother was governor of Texas, she used to have Governor Girls School and she invited anyone from around the country who wanted to run for office.

No way. That’s awesome.

It was in the 90s. But two of the women who actually came to a weekend for women leaders, one was Janet Napolitano who went on to become Homeland Security Secretary and another one is Kathleen Sebelius, who became Governor of Kansas. I always think of stories like that and experiences people have where they’re thrown into something just because someone said, I’ve got my eye on you, and you can do all kinds of things.

Speaking of your own mother, this has been a very mother-centric project. Two of our interview subjects were mom and daughter, women brought their own kids, and your own daughter, Hannah, is here working with you. I wonder if you have any reflections on that.

I was really fortunate. I was raised in a family where just being part of public service was just what you did. I am extremely privileged to always have had a job and a career that I felt like was meaningful for me. Most people don’t have that. In fact, I remember my first job organizing hotel workers. These women were just trying to get by trying to support their kids. Many of them worked two jobs, and yet they were willing to risk even those minimum wage jobs to organize a union and to fight back because they wanted something different and better for their kids. And it is inspiring to be here with and to have Kait and Nancy and all these women juggling toddlers and newborns and pumping and yet getting on a plane to wherever to tell their story. I love that we can know each other’s families.

I’m incredibly lucky that my kids have all found their path. The more we can do to raise folks’ expectations of what they can do and support them once we push them out there is really important. To me, it’s the most gratifying thing. It is funny. I spent so many years at Planned Parenthood, and I always say the best thing that happened is when we got healthcare for women protected and made sure that birth control was covered at no cost.

But secretly, the best thing has been seeing the young women that started with me at Planned Parenthood go on and lead organizations themselves, like Kelley Robinson, the now leader of HRC [Human Rights Campaign]. She was a young feisty organizer with Planned Parenthood. That to me is so gratifying, seeing a whole new generation of young women finding their way. And that’s going to happen here in Louisiana too.

There’s a lot of talk about how young people are nihilistic, which makes them disengage in the political system. How do we fix that?

I think particularly for young people, you can’t guilt people into it. I think it’s listening to them and meeting them where they are. I am not surprised that young people are discouraged by politics. That’s kind of always our challenge. But I think that fighting for these issues of bodily autonomy, of the rights to make decisions about your pregnancy, to have a healthy child if you want to, these are fundamental issues that cross party lines, certainly that cross generations.

Being able to find ways for people to get in that fight, it’s really important. That’s the only way we change things. It’s not from the top down. It’s going to be from the bottom up. And regardless of what happens in this election, which I hope goes a certain way, people in Louisiana are still not going to have access to reproductive healthcare. So it is not to say the election is incredibly important, but so is creating a groundswell of organizing in a state like this that begins to chip away and make a difference in how politics go.

How do you keep fighting for reproductive freedom? I can imagine that it would be really demoralizing to spend your entire career and so much time on this issue, and then have Roe fall after you’ve left Planned Parenthood. But you’re still doing it. You’re still going.

I feel so lucky. I’m fortunate to be able to do anything at this point that helps build constituencies and encourages young women.

If we had come down here and people had said, no way, we’re giving up and we don’t have any stories to tell or we don’t want to tell them, I might have to rethink this answer, but it has been just the opposite. It’s amazing the people’s willingness to share those stories and be public.

It’s like how do you harness that and continue to provide the support? And in my mind, it’s not how to create interest, it’s just how to sustain it and support it.