Obituary: Former Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards, 67, has died. She suffered from brain cancer, which is about as bad as it gets. She was also the daughter of the late Texas governor Ann Richards.
Snip:
Her mother, the former Texas governor Ann Richards, was a political legend, but Richards herself became a household name in 2015, after anti-abortion activists released secret recordings of Planned Parenthood workers purportedly discussing the sale of fetal tissue. The recordings – which Planned Parenthood said were doctored – spurred multiple congressional and state investigations that could not substantiate their contents, and led US House Republicans to grill Richards in an hours-long, highly publicized hearing.
After stepping down from Planned Parenthood in 2018, Richards went on to found Supermajority, an organization dedicated to championing women’s leadership. After the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022 – in a case involving the kind of state-level abortion restrictions that Richards tried to defeat – Richards started Charley, a bot to help abortion seekers get accurate information about the procedure, and Abortion in America, a campaign to publicize stories of post-Roe abortions. In late 2024, Joe Biden awarded Richards the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the US.
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