Cecile Richards, the former president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), died memorably on the holiday celebrating the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 47th president of the United States. A day of light and darkness for the United States.
Notably, two years before his passing, Dr. King was honored by Planned Parenthood for his “courageous resistance to bigotry and his lifelong dedication to the advancement of social justice and human dignity.” In his speech delivered by his wife, Coretta Scott King, he voiced the grave harms inflicted on poor women forced into unwanted motherhood.
His speech began by suggesting that if the United States were visited by observers from another universe, they would be “stupefied at our conduct.” He explained “that for death planning,” the United States “spend[s] billions to create engines and strategies for war.” Meanwhile, guests from another planet “would observe that we spend paltry sums” for family planning. He surmised that “our visitors from outer space could be forgiven if they reported home that our planet is inhabited by a race of insane men whose future is bleak and uncertain.”
Dr. King spoke of the gravity of poverty overlapping with racial discrimination and sex inequality. He noted that Black women keenly understood the ‘social paradox’ underlying persistent social inequality.
Decades before Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality,” Dr. King spoke of the gravity of poverty overlapping with racial discrimination and sex inequality. He noted that Black women keenly understood the “social paradox” underlying persistent social inequality, because they have “lived so long with evils that could be eradicated but were perpetuated by indifference or ignorance.” As he noted, “The hard-core bigot was merely one of” the many “adversaries” undermining Black Americans’ reach for fundamental freedoms contained in the promise of a great America.
His speech spoke both to the strategies and methods needed to dismantle injustice and served as a witnessing device—laying bare the “cruel evil” of policies that denied family planning. He stated, “There is scarcely anything more tragic in human life than a child who is not wanted,” because “that which should be a blessing becomes a curse for the parent and child.”
On Cecile Richards’ passing, Dr. King’s message rings with a certain clarity and pain. Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey have been overturned by a Supreme Court poised to dismantle many hard-won, fundamental gains of the past half-century in education, voting, the environment, criminal justice reform and reproductive rights. And in this backdrop, the United States leads all industrial nations in maternal mortality and maternal morbidity. The consequences are particularly pronounced for Black American women who are nearly four times more likely than their white counterparts to suffer premature deaths associated with pregnancy and childbirth.
As the threat to reproductive freedom became more pronounced in the months leading to the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, Inc. decision, Richards penned a introspective commentary in the New York Times in which she spoke of having “one regret from [her] time leading Planned Parenthood” and it is this: She “believed that providing vital healthcare, with public opinion on our side, would be enough to overcome the political onslaught. I underestimated the callousness of the Republican Party and its willingness to trade off the rights of women for political expediency.”
On Cecile Richard’s passing, Dr. King’s message rings with a certain clarity and pain.
A few months before she penned that commentary, Richards joined me on our On the Issues: Fifteen Minutes of Feminism podcast platform to speak about the dark money underlying abortion bans. It was prescient in many ways—nearly a year before the Dobbs decision. By this time, she had moved on from leading PPFA, and cofounded the women’s political action group, Supermajority and served as co-chair of American Bridge PAC. She had also published a memoir, Make Trouble: Standing Up, Speaking Out, and Finding the Courage to Lead.
In that interview, Cecile confided that she thought it was always going “to just get better.” It was sincere optimism that gave way to the stark realities of Texas leading the charge to gut reproductive healthcare gains. As she expressed to me, “I think this is all kind of coming crashing up together. … I don’t think it’s any accident that in a state where the voting population is changing, the attitudes of people is changing, young people so much more progressive, that we were also seeing this development of an authoritarian state.”
On her untimely death on the holiday celebrating Dr. King’s life and legacy, the phrase “rest in power” seems fitting.
