Feminist activist Cecile Richards, who fiercely advocated for abortion rights and led Planned Parenthood for 12 years, has died after an 18-month battle with brain cancer, her family announced on Monday. She was 67.
“This morning our beloved Cecile passed away at home, surrounded by her family and her ever-loyal dog, Ollie,” her husband and children said in a statement. “Our hearts are broken today but no words can do justice to the joy she brought to our lives.”
Richards was diagnosed with glioblastoma in 2023. When asked by the Cut last year why she continued her activism even after such a devastating diagnosis, she quoted her mother, the late Texas governor Ann Richards: “Why should your life only be about you?”
She lived by this principle. Born in Waco, Texas, in 1957, Richards was the eldest daughter of David, a civil-rights lawyer, and Ann, a then-housewife who’d eventually become a Democratic powerhouse in the state. Her foray into politics began in her teenage years, when she wore a black armband to protest the Vietnam War and helped her mother campaign for Sarah Weddington, the lawyer who argued Roe v. Wade and who ran for Texas’s state legislature. Richards went on to attend Brown University and worked as a labor organizer following graduation, where she met her husband, Kirk Adams. When Ann ran for Texas governor, Richards returned to the state to work in her campaign. She later founded several organizations and worked as a deputy chief of staff for Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi.
In 2006, she got the job that’d make her one of the most visible abortion-rights advocates in the country: running Planned Parenthood, the largest reproductive health-care provider in the nation and a recurrent target for Republican lawmakers. As president, Richards expanded Planned Parenthood and transformed into a political giant, reinvigorating its advocacy arm at the state and national levels and leading the organization through several crises, including attempts to defund it.
She stepped down from her role in 2018, calling her tenure “the honor of my lifetime.” She continued being active in Democratic politics and advocating for abortion rights, particularly after the Supreme Court overturned Roe in 2022. The glioblastoma diagnosis, which she received in the summer of 2023, didn’t slow down her efforts: She co-founded Charley, a chatbot that helps abortion seekers find accurate information, and Abortion in America, a storytelling platform capturing the impact of the Dobbs decision. In November 2024, President Joe Biden awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Richards is survived by her husband, Kirk, and their three children, Lily, Hannah, and Daniel. “If you’d like to celebrate Cecile today, we invite you to put on some New Orleans jazz, gather with friends and family over a good meal, and remember something she said a lot over the last year: ‘It’s not hard to imagine future generations one day asking: When there was so much at stake for our country, what did you do?’” they said in their statement. “The only acceptable answer is: ‘Everything we could.’”