The first time I really sat down with Cecile Richards, it was early in her tenure at Planned Parenthood, at a big round breakfast table in a midtown Manhattan restaurant. I’d been told she was new to New York—though not, of course, new to the spotlight, as a longtime labor organizer and the daughter of iconic Texas governor Ann Richards—and didn’t know that many women in media. Would I arrange a few editors to come meet her?
I did, and by the time our plates were cleared, had two thoughts: 1. I would follow this woman into war, and 2. Can we be friends?? Cecile was forthright, funny, a natural-born organizer, and seemingly unafraid. She went on to spend 12 years at Planned Parenthood, from 2006 to 2018, before leaving to launch multiple other abortion-rights and pro-democracy initiatives, and many of us at that table were lucky enough to become friends with her. Oh, and yeah—as it turned out, she kind of did end up going to war.
It wasn’t that long ago, but Cecile Richards led Planned Parenthood during a different time than the one we live in now. You might assume it was an easier time–and of course it was: before the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, before ERs were turning away so many pregnant women, before states proposed charging the one in four of us who have abortions with murder.
But it was also a time when abortion wasn’t talked about. Correction: The people who opposed abortion were talking about it plenty; one study found that 94% of all abortion mentions in the ‘10s were on Fox, and filled with falsehoods. But public discourse in general studiously avoided the A-word.; Here at Glamour, where I was editor at the time, we always covered the issue frankly, but there was pressure on many public figures to steer clear. “My managers are begging me to get another charity,” a well-known actress and Planned Parenthood supporter told me ruefully back then.
That meant Cecile and a handful of other high-profile abortion-rights advocates were out there alone, fighting our fight even as abortion restrictions and violence against providers gained steam. In 2015, when she was hauled before Congress to testify for 12 hours in response to a wholly false claim against Planned Parenthood, Times columnist Gail Collins described Cecile’s job as “steering a boat carrying unstable explosives…while surrounded on both sides by enemy pirates throwing burning torches.”
But she could take the pirates. When we honored her that year as a Glamour Woman of the Year, I watched and rewatched the footage of that Congressional testimony, marveling at her composure (and that perfect Texas accent). Americans everywhere took note of her leadership; when we photographed her on the street for that story, people of all ages and genders approached her to thank her. “That’s why I’m doing this,” she’d say. “People deserve health care.” And, as Cecile’s warnings about the rise of the anti-woman opposition came to pass, and our rights began to be eroded—gradually, then suddenly—more and more of us found the courage to stand by her, or at least to try.
There’s more you should know about Cecile, of course–how she missed her own college graduation because she was protesting apartheid; how she almost didn’t go to the job interview for Planned Parenthood because she had never run anything that ginormous before, but then remembered her mother’s saying that “this is the only life you have, so don’t wait”; how she championed young women of color and encouraged them to lead; how she loved jazz, and New Orleans, and of course, how she was diagnosed far too early with a far too vicious cancer. My list of Ways Cecile Inspired Me is too long to detail here (when I was helping start The Meteor, she came to our first meeting and sat on the floor brainstorming), but her last 18 months were a master class in how to live, even though she knew she was dying. She spoke at the Democratic National Convention, on TV, everywhere, about what the election meant for our bodies and our lives. Her sometimes halting speech only made the message stronger.
It felt cruel to have lost Cecile on a day when we needed her most, as a new president determined to undo her work—our work—took office. Why wasn’t she still here, tireless, and wearing something bright and joyous even in this honestly exhausting moment? I thought of a conversation she and I had had a few years ago at the invitation of the designer Prabal Gurung. A woman in the audience had asked whether she thought young women, raised to think they could do anything but faced with politicians who want to stop them, would be disheartened, give up, stop trying.
“Definitely not,” said Cecile. “You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.”
That’s us. We’re the genie. And we can’t unlearn what she taught us about fighting, or freedom.
Cindi Leive was editor in chief of Glamour from 2001 to 2018. She is now the CEO and Co-Founder of The Meteor.
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