Cecile Richards will live forever

Her life is the example we need right now

Cecile Richards passed away on January 20th from brain cancer at the age of 67.

Though she lived in New York for the last long while, from where she heroically led Planned Parenthood through some of its greatest trials and challenges, her heart always remained in Texas. And so it was in Austin that her family and friends held a memorial service for her this past weekend.

I flew up from El Paso Saturday morning, happy to find a packed house at the Ann Richards School in Austin. It was full of folks who’ve lived the fight with her, from the early days of Cecile’s labor organizing in East Texas to her more recent work with Planned Parenthood and her political action group Supermajority.

I also saw alumni from our 2022 governor’s race, where Cecile served as our national finance chair. When I had asked her at the time if she’d use the national profile and massive goodwill she’d generated over her life to help us raise the support we needed in Texas, she instantly said yes. Whatever the odds, she was compelled to step up to give us a fighting chance to replace the governor who had outlawed abortion and other lifesaving healthcare from our state with one who would restore it.

Standing with Cecile and Lucie Baines Johnson in 2022

As the service began, Texas AFL-CIO President Rick Levy shared stories about Cecile’s and her husband Kirk Adam’s home in Tyler, Texas in the 1980s being the headquarters for the “booming” East Texas progressive movement. It was there that the young couple focused on organizing workers in a part of the state that was too often overlooked, taken for granted, or just written off. We heard about her passion for the fight — wherever there was injustice, that’s where she wanted to be… bringing people together and organizing them against powerful interests, come what may.

You know the speech Senator Robert F. Kennedy gave in South Africa in 1966 where he talked about what happens when good people strike out against injustice?

[They send] forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

I was thinking about that at the service when Wendy Davis recalled Cecile’s support of her historic 13-hour filibuster to preserve abortion access in Texas in 2013. Cecile’s life of action generated hope and energy, and helped power Davis’ successful effort to preserve women’s healthcare through the end of that legislative session. That action, in turn, is still reverberating throughout Texas as we confront the most obscene abortion ban in America.

Davis also shared a story about a young Cecile Richards being sent to the principal’s office at Westlake Junior High for wearing a black armband in protest of the Vietnam war. The principal insisted on calling Cecile’s mom. “It was his lucky day,” she later told a friend. “My mom wasn’t home.” That mom, of course, being future Texas governor Ann Richards.

In 1972, at the age of 15, Cecile volunteered with Ann on Sarah Weddington’s campaign for state representative. The year before, Weddington had argued the Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade with another Texas attorney, Linda Coffee. With the Richards’ help, Weddington won her state house election and, in 1973, her work before the Supreme Court on behalf of fellow Texan Norma McCorvey (Jane Roe) paid off, establishing a woman’s constitutional right to abortion.

Think about that — at a time when abortion was just as illegal in Texas as it is today, three courageous Texas women convinced an all-male Supreme Court to protect the right to privacy and bodily autonomy for the first time in American history.

No one rode to the rescue from outside of Texas, no all-powerful politician saved the day. It was Texas women who did it for Texas women, who did it for the entire country. And what they did transformed the lives of generations of Americans, giving them control over their bodies, their healthcare and their future. It stood the test of time and every manner of opposition for nearly 50 years.

Perhaps that experience was on Cecile’s mind when she made the difficult decision to move to New York and take on the leadership of Planned Parenthood in 2006. Not only would it force her to leave Texas, but it would put her in the crosshairs of extreme attacks, political and personal, for over a decade.

In 2023 the National Abortion Federation estimated that there had been 11 murders, 42 bombings, 200 arsons, 531 assaults, 492 clinic invasions, 375 burglaries, and thousands of other criminal activities directed at patients, providers, and volunteers at abortion clinics across America since 1977. Republicans in Congress and in state houses across the country relentlessly targeted Planned Parenthood, often openly lying about the organization’s practices and inciting the kind of violence that was sure to follow (never mind the fact that the only federal funding they received was for preventive health care services like cancer screenings, birth control, and testing for sexually transmitted diseases).

This culminated in 2015, when Republicans hauled Richards before a Congressional Committee following the release of a heavily doctored video purporting to show Planned Parenthood employees discussing the sale of fetal tissue. “This is not about fetal tissue,” she responded. “This is about attacking women’s access to health care."

They sought to humiliate her and discredit the organization, but Richards stood strong, destroying their lies and emerging vindicated despite the McCarthyesque sham.

But ultimately, in spite of her heroic leadership, the sustained attacks against women’s healthcare, attacks that began the day that Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, were more than even she could overcome.

Donald Trump’s victory in the next year’s presidential election and his ability to place anti-choice justices on the Supreme Court meant that the days of reproductive healthcare freedom in America were numbered.

Perhaps the 2022 Dobbs decision that overturned Roe was on her mind when, in accepting the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Joe Biden last year, she reminded us that “there are no permanent wins and no permanent losses.”

President Joe Biden with Cecile Richards, her husband Kirk Adams and First Lady Jill Biden after awarding Cecile the Presidential Medal of Freedom in a photo posted to the President’s X account, Nov. 20, 2024.

In other words, no matter how hard-fought the win, no matter how just the cause, no victory is ever final. Whether it’s Roe V. Wade or the Voting Rights Act (gutted by the Court’s 2013 Shelby v. Holder decision) — or even the Constitution itself and the governing premise that we are all equal under the law — anything we achieve can be taken from us by those who oppose progress, freedom and justice. So we must continue to fight for as long as we still draw a breath, focused on winning those victories and securing them against the relentless attacks that always follow.

And that, of course, is exactly what Cecile did in her life.

If that sounds exhausting, it is. But it sure beats the alternative. You don’t have to worry about fighting for the things you care about in the tyrannies of Russia, Saudi Arabia or Venezuela. Because in those places, the things you care about have already been decided for you and there is no appeal.

You won’t have to worry about fighting for them here anymore either, if we fail to save our country from the unprecedented assault on our democracy and constitution taking place right now.

But, it’s not doom alone that counts. There can be a real and profound happiness found in the fight. You see it in the pictures of Cecile from throughout her life, she just radiated the fulfillment and purpose that comes from fighting for what matters most. I mean, why else are we here? In remarks made after Trump was elected, and just weeks before she would pass away, she said:

We have to fight for every inch of progress, and we can’t take anything for granted. That’s especially true in challenging moments like the one we find ourselves in now. But what a joy and a privilege it is to be part of the long struggle to make our country a fairer and more hopeful place.

After all, as my mother, Ann Richards, used to say: “Why should your life be only about you?”

At the end of the funeral service, Cecile’s husband Kirk talked about their life together, their time in New Orleans early in their marriage, their lives spent fighting for justice and freedom — especially for the most vulnerable — and the spirit that Cecile brought to everything she did.

He said that if each of us approaches the fight in front of us with that same spirit, Cecile will live forever.

At that, the Preservation Hall band that had flown in from New Orleans for the occasion — joined by young musicians from the Ann Richards school — led us in a second line parade out into the beautiful, warm Austin evening, each of us thinking about what we could do to meet this moment like Cecile would want us to.

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PS: While I’ve been posting specific actions we can all take in Notes (from lighting up the Capitol switchboard to joining others in your community via Indivisible), I thought it might also be fitting to support Planned Parenthood Texas Votes in memory of Cecile. PPTV is working to overturn some of the most oppressive — and deadliest — reproductive healthcare laws in the country. You can donate to them here.