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Cecile Richards strides into the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, student union in a hot-pink dress and a black cardigan. As she walks past me I notice that her toenails are also pink—a color that precisely matches the “I stand with Planned Parenthood” pins and signs and T-shirts that are all around the room. She is uncharacteristically late this morning, and before she arrived I was a little worried: There was only a smattering of local media, and the energy was muted. But as soon as she walked in, the air crackled—as if, in her presence, every atom gained an electron. There is just something about Richards—her height and carriage, her husky voice, that startlingly blonde boy-cut—that makes you sit up and pay attention.
She is here to participate in a Planned Parenthood patient roundtable designed to highlight the sometimes heartrending personal stories of women who depend on the organization for so many things, not least of all affordable birth control and safe and legal abortion, a word that no one here shies away from. As Richards likes to point out, “The average woman in America spends five years having children . . . and an average of 30 years trying not to get pregnant,” which elicits a deep, knowing laugh from the women in the room. “That’s the work that we’re about.”
These roundtables—held in places like upstate New York, Arizona, and Wisconsin, where Planned Parenthood is in danger and legislators aren’t listening—are just one part of a strategy to keep pressure on Congress in what has turned out to be a pitched battle to protect women’s reproductive rights and health during the Trump era. Planned Parenthood had “big dreams,” as Richards puts it, at the prospect of the first woman president. “It is kind of hard to then go: ‘Wow, maybe we’re just going to have to fight to keep this boulder from rolling on top of us.’ ” Or boulders, as it were. President Trump reinstated the global gag rule, expanding it to block foreign aid to any nongovernmental group that discusses abortion as part of family planning. He appointed Charmaine Yoest—who has said that abortion increases the risk of breast cancer and that IUDs have “life-ending properties”—to the Department of Health and Human Services; and Teresa Manning—who has said that “contraception doesn’t work”—as his chief family-planning official. The House Republicans’ American Health Care Act blocks federal funding for services at Planned Parenthood clinics, as does Trump’s proposed 2018 budget, which includes deep cuts to Medicaid as well. (More than half of Planned Parenthood patients are recipients of the program.)
The sense of fear at the roundtable is palpable—it is about losing not just access to affordable birth control but what one woman describes as the “quality of conversation” that comes with care at Planned Parenthood. “As I’m sure some of you know, sometimes it’s really hard to find a gynecologist here in town,” says a young woman named Gabrielle, and everyone laughs nervously. “One you can feel comfortable with. . . .” Another woman, Esperanza, an immigrant from Guatemala, originally went to one of Planned Parenthood’s local health centers because of a pain in her breast. “They don’t care about your status,” she says, “or if you don’t speak the language.” During the Q&A session, a woman in the front row pipes up about attending a chaotic town-hall meeting in Reno earlier that week with Republican senator Dean Heller. “You have to do something with your anger, but I’ve done everything I know how to do,” she says. “I’ve looked him in the eye; he’s lying to me. Now what do I do?”
Richards, who is the daughter of the late, legendary governor of Texas Ann Richards, says, “I know it’s frustrating. My mom used to say, paraphrasing Edna St. Vincent Millay, ‘Life isn’t one thing after the other; it’s the same damn thing over and over again.’ I think . . . you have to realize: Just when you get sick of saying something is just when other folks are beginning to hear it.”
Afterward, Richards and I head to the Cox Pavilion, an arena on campus, where she will give a speech at a rally headlined by Bernie Sanders, as part of the so-called unity tour he’s been on for the past week with Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez. Designed to bring the party together after its catastrophic losses in November, it has instead served mostly to highlight divisions, not least of all because in the middle of the tour, Sanders and Perez campaigned for the Democratic candidate for mayor of Omaha, who supported several anti-abortion bills as a member of Nebraska’s legislature. The backlash was swift. Ilyse Hogue, the president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, called their support “not only disappointing but politically stupid.”
Backstage at the Cox Pavilion, we crowd into an elevator the size of a Manhattan studio apartment. Someone comments on how “massive” the lift is. “Hey, I come from Texas, my friend,” says Richards. “I can show you massive.” We get off into a holding area, and a few moments later, a group of young, well-dressed men joins us. “Hey, guys,” says Richards. “This looks like an important crew.” It turns out to be Sanders’s staff, and sure enough, he’s right behind them, looking disheveled and sunburned. “Howyadoin’?” he says in his inimitable way. “Hey,” says Richards cheerfully, “Bernie. Good to see you. Welcome to the desert. I know you’ve been on the road.” He is pacing and staring at the ground. “Yeah, yeah,” he grumbles. I wouldn’t call their rapport warm, exactly, but Richards will later assure me there’s no tension. “He’s somebody who really appreciates what organizing is about. And that’s what our work is about. Nothing is going to change in D.C. unless it changes on the ground.”
At one point, a woman of a certain age with a blonde coif appears. She looks like she’s gotten lost on her way to Bergdorf Goodman. “Hey!” says Richards. “How are you?” It is Elaine Wynn, the ex-wife of Steve Wynn, who has become sort of the Brooke Astor of Las Vegas and recently wrote Planned Parenthood a check for $1 million. “This is the glamorous life we lead, here in the bowels of the Cox Pavilion,” says Richards apologetically. “Oh, I know the back of the house,” says Wynn. “And I know this building. I chaired the opening of it a hundred years ago, with Frank Sinatra and Diana Ross. Sammy was sick and couldn’t make it.” Ah, Vegas.
Richards introduces her to the group of young women hovering around in pink T-shirts. “This is my power team,” says Richards, when she suddenly notices a button pinned to one of them. She leans in to take a closer look. “You have my favorite Planned Parenthood button on,” says Richards. “It’s not even official.” What does it say? I ask. “Don’t fuck with us, don’t fuck without us,” says Richards. “We don’t make them. I don’t know where they come from. No matter how many times we say that’s not our official tag line, they’re very hard to put underground.” Wynn levels her with a look. “Well, you have to be prepared to either defend—or not—that button.”
The day after Donald Trump’s election, the collective panic and despair on the left translated into a tidal wave of donations that went overwhelmingly to two nonprofits: Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union. Both were founded a century ago, and they have been working closely together ever since. (When Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger was arrested in 1916 for handing out pamphlets on how women could avoid pregnancy, it was ACLU founder Roger Baldwin who came to her defense.)
It was as if a huge swath of progressive America—more than 600,000 new donors to Planned Parenthood and 1.6 million to the ACLU—intuited that these organizations were now the twin pillars of a newly emboldened progressive movement, and their leaders, Anthony Romero, the ACLU’s executive director, and Richards, were the faces of the resistance. It was a perfect pairing—the two are close friends, staunch allies, and battle-tested generals of their respective armies. “Cecile and I understand each other,” says Romero. “We have the same value system. When I’m having a hard day, I call her and say, ‘You need to help me dust myself off.’ She is always empathetic, but always the first one to push you back out there.”
She’s a natural at it. In the ten plus years Richards has led Planned Parenthood, she has scored major wins; the biggest of all, to her mind, was getting birth control covered for 55 million women under the Affordable Care Act, which has also contributed to bringing the abortion rate to its lowest level since Roe v. Wade in 1973. But as the threats to women’s reproductive health have come out of Washington, one after another, Cecile Richards has had to be everywhere at once: traveling around the country to meet patients and making constant trips to Washington to educate, lobby, and harangue members of Congress. Sometimes it can feel like Richards is on cable news every single night, where she is a marvel of clarity and focused intensity. If you know her only from CNN or MSNBC (as I did) you would not realize how funny and easygoing she is in person.
She inherited her sense of humor—and her fire—from her mother. The elder Richards was an outspoken feminist who was given to salty one-liners, and who was open about her struggle with alcoholism and her disdain for phoniness, even in her own party. When I ask Cecile what fueled her mother’s unlikely success in Texas politics, her answer is telling: “Democratic officials used to bring her to talk to these big gatherings and say, ‘Teach us how to talk to people.’ She always told them, ‘If my mother back in Waco can’t understand what I’m saying, then no one is hearing it.’ ”
This is a core belief of Richards’s—that, as she puts it, “there is a real hunger in this country for something more authentic and for ‘someone talking about me’ ”—and it speaks to the way she’s steering the organization she leads. In addition to being a health-care provider, Planned Parenthood has an independent political arm, the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, which was founded in 1989 by then-president Faye Wattleton. In the past, in the face of criticism from congressional Republicans, Richards insisted that she did not directly manage the PPAF—and the funding between the two is kept strictly separate, as required by federal rules. But since Trump’s election, it’s increasingly hard to draw a line between any efforts to provide women’s reproductive services and political action. “I do feel like our opportunity, as well as our obligation, is bigger than it was before,” she says. “We’ve grown our advocacy side, but that’s because we’re not just an important reproductive health–care provider—we’re a movement. We advocate for the patients we see and for millions of other women.” And women are paying attention. “Record numbers are calling Congress and showing up at town-hall meetings,” says Richards, “but it is discouraging when you can’t find an ally in this administration to stand up for women’s rights.”
Trump is an “enormous disappointment,” she adds. She reminds me how, during his campaign, he described Planned Parenthood’s “good work”; how he said “millions of women” were helped by its health services. “It’s been a very tough four months for women.” There’s also the appalling tableau of Republican senators huddling in a room, rewriting the House health-care bill: “Not a single woman, Republican or Democrat, among that group,” Richards says. “It is the most outrageous display of pushing women to the side.” What she’s seeing is a fundamental division in America: “It’s between people who believe that health care is a social good and other folks who really do believe that not everybody deserves it. I think that’s a very small minority of people, but unfortunately, a lot of them are in Congress.” She lets out a mordant chuckle. “Dealing with men in Congress, for the most part—it’s pretty dispiriting in terms of the lack of regard they have for women. And they’re not even . . . it’s like they don’t know what they don’t know and they don’t even care what they don’t know.”
Richards has felt the brunt of congressional hostility many times since becoming Planned Parenthood’s president in early 2006. “But in the last couple of years, I would say, the attacks have become even more ferocious,” says New Jersey senator Cory Booker. “The distortions and the smearing and the dirty tricks.” He is referring, of course, to the release of doctored videos in the summer of 2015 that seemed to show several of the organization’s top personnel discussing the sale of fetal tissue; a group of conservative Republicans seized on the videos to press Congress to block all federal funding to Planned Parenthood as part of a broader spending package at the time. Richards was called to testify before Congress that fall and came under withering questioning for nearly five hours, testimony that was watched by millions around the country, reinforcing her status as a hero of the left.
“We just happened to bump into each other after the hearing, walking to Union Station,” says Booker, “and seeing that look of determination on her face—I hugged her and I thought that I was going to be the one who was trying to lift her spirits, but it was almost like she energized me. Her leadership now, in the time of Trump, is really reaching epic proportions.”
“What she does exceedingly well is she always puts the patients first,” says New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand. “It’s about them; it’s about their story; it’s about their needs. That’s what makes her a powerful leader. Those stories are why you bother. Those stories are what informs us and makes us fight.”
Romero believes that Richards is one of the reasons that the Women’s March on Washington in January was so enormous. “She’s really galvanized a whole new generation of activists,” he says. Richards recalls flying to Washington that day to give a speech. “The plane is packed, it’s kind of chaotic, and there’s a guy in the middle trying to cram a sign into the overhead,” she says. “Someone says, ‘Show us your sign!’ And he’s this big guy and he turns around and it reads, ‘I am really upset.’ The whole plane erupts and pulls out their pink hats, and it’s like a big party. This election has brought out people who are not usually sign carriers.” But she remembers someone else, a young Southern flight attendant whom she struck up a conversation with. “She said, ‘Oh, y’all are going to that march?’ ” says Richards. “And then she said, ‘Do you think that even makes a difference?’ ” And of course, who knew that we would arrive to four million people, the biggest march in American history. But women sometimes, they need to see. . . .” She trails off. “I wonder what she thinks now.”
A week after the trip to Vegas, I meet Richards at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, not too far from her apartment. (“MoMA is her favorite spot,” says her daughter Lily Adams, who worked on Hillary Clinton’s campaign and is now California senator Kamala Harris’s communications director.) Because it is a perfect sunny afternoon, we find a table in the sculpture garden and talk for a couple of hours. Richards is wearing a navy sheath with ruching at the neck, and black mules. “I’m not a fashion person,” she says. “I basically like to wear navy blue, and I don’t need a lot of extras. My mother was obsessed with clothes, so—as people do—I went in the other direction.”
I ask Richards about downtime—of which I suspect she has barely any. “I like to scuba dive. When I have a minute, I get out of New York and see the world—I’ve been to every continent with my daughter Hannah. And I’m a cook.” This I knew from talking to Romero, who had described the big dinner party she throws every year the day before Thanksgiving. “It’s funny to come from Texas to New York City, where everyone seems to use their oven to store shoes,” Richards says. “When I moved here, we immediately redid our kitchen. I’m a big baker, and I’m learning how to make my own pasta. It’s therapeutic.”
Richards turns 60 this month, but you would never know it. And I don’t necessarily mean that because of how great she looks, but because she is given to the slang and syntax of millennials. When I ask about Lily, for example, who at 30 is the oldest of her three children (her twins, Hannah and Daniel, are 26), Richards says, “She’s, like . . . literally . . . ? I was just the genetic transfer between Ann Richards and Lily. She’s so smart, so politically smart, and committed. I listen to her and I hear my mother. Mom was always, like, ‘Can’t wear patterns on TV! Jackie Kennedy never wore white shoes!’ Lily’s growing into that. She definitely has a point of view, and in fact sometimes she will tell me things she says to Senator Harris. . . .” Here her eyes widen. “She’s very direct.”
Richards’s first job after graduating from Brown in 1980 was as a labor organizer, running union campaigns for garment workers, nursing-home workers, and janitors, positions that took her from New Orleans to Houston and Los Angeles. In New Orleans she met the man who would become her husband—Kirk Adams, also a labor organizer. Today he’s the executive director for the Healthcare Education Project (and no slouch: In 2015, he was ranked as one of the 100 most influential people in the industry by Modern Healthcare). When I ask Richards what Kirk is like, she calls him a saint. “Did you ever see The Way We Were? I flash on that all the time. I feel like I’m still going to be Barbra Streisand with the ‘ban the bomb’ sign while Robert Redford has moved on to this fabulous life.” She laughs. “No, he’s a really patient guy who deserves a lot of credit. Kirk was always . . . rock solid. We’ve been through everything: union-organizing campaigns; having a mother-in-law who is the governor of Texas, who, as Kirk once said, ‘Even after she lost her reelection she thought I worked for her.’ ” She lets out a big laugh. “He grew up in a typical working-class Irish Catholic family in Massachusetts. Everybody worked all the time. That’s all they did: work. He saw what happened to his parents, and he has incredible empathy and commitment to social justice, just really believes in it in an old-school Catholic way. It’s very hard to find people who start out that way and then are still . . . there.”
When Richards was 32, with a new baby and pregnant with her twins, she dropped everything to help run her mother’s campaign for governor. She has been deeply engaged in electoral politics ever since. When I ask her if she feels duty bound to encourage women to run, she says, “I do. I’ve never had more women come up to me . . . just everywhere. And they say, ‘I’m kind of thinking about running for office. What do you think?’ Because women know that no one is ever going to come up to them and say, ‘You have got to run for that office.’ That just doesn’t happen. So any woman who has the slightest inkling, we just have to bring ’em in and have ’em do it. And it’s not that women are better, it’s just lack of representation, and that’s half the reason we’re fighting about these issues.”
Has she ever been tempted to run?
“Not at all,” she says. “I’ve seen too much, even with my mother’s races. Also, I feel like in my job I can actually make a bigger difference than if I was in elective office.”
When she talks about the future of Planned Parenthood, you get a sense of what she means. “We have 2.5 million patients every year in our health centers, but we have six million online every month who are getting information or chatting with a doctor or clinician. That to me is where we have to be. If this administration continues in the direction they’re going, of making it harder, particularly for young people and women, to get sexual- and reproductive-health care, we need to be as inventive as possible.”
As our talk in the garden is winding down, Richards admits to me, unprompted, that she almost didn’t even call back the people who were searching for someone to lead Planned Parenthood. “I was like, ‘Well, I don’t know how to do that’—all the reasons that women take themselves out of the equation. And it was my mother who said, ‘Are you kidding me?’ I definitely would not be doing what I do today if it had not been for her. I hope that’s what we’re seeing now with these women who have never done this kind of thing before: young women who have never organized, never held a sign, never called a member of Congress, never spoken up at a town-hall meeting. And they are now. Yes, they’re concerned about the future and their families, but it’s also because they see other women, and it’s given them courage.”
I mention to her that my husband, who prides himself on knowing everything about people like her, was surprised by how little he knew about Richards, other than what her job is and who her mother was. Is that by design? “Not in any intentional way,” she says. “You’ve got to maintain your humility in an organization like this because one in five women have come to Planned Parenthood at some time in their life. And sometimes I’m the only person they can recognize and thank for the care they got when they were, like, 22 in Illinois. You could easily start to develop some sort of grandiose sense of yourself, partly because this organization has literally changed the lives of millions of women, and almost every single one of them can tell you every single detail about that visit.” She pauses again. “Women are constantly approaching me on the streets, asking, ‘What should I do?’ I say, ‘Don’t wait for instructions. Just get going.’ ”
Just then, a woman who looks to be about 50 spots Richards, and I can see her tentatively approaching. She stops about 20 feet away.
“Are you Cecile Richards?”
“Yes!”
“Sorry to interrupt,” she says.
“That’s OK!” says Richards.
The woman stares at her for a second, and puts her hand to her heart. “Thank you.”
“Oh, listen,” says Richards. “Thank you.”
“You bring tears to my eyes.”
“It’s going to be OK,” says Richards.
“Promise?” says the woman, smiling.
“We’re working on it!”