https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-abortion-rights-movement-is-bolder-than-its-been-in-years-thats-cecile-richardss-plan/2016/08/16/ea96bf1a-3d34-11e6-a66f-aa6c1883b6b1_story.html8/16/16
The abortion rights movement is bolder than it’s been in years. That’s Cecile Richards’s plan.On the morning of one of the most important days in her career, Cecile Richards waited anxiously in her office at Planned Parenthood headquarters in Manhattan, texting furiously with friends across the country.
A few minutes past 10 a.m., a message from her daughter flashed across the screen. A single word: Yay!
“That was when I knew we’d won,” Richards says, recalling the moment when she learned of the decision in the biggest abortion-related case to come before the Supreme Court in more than two decades. In a 5-to-3 vote, the justices had ruled that Texas’s restrictions on abortion clinics placed an “undue burden” on women seeking to end their pregnancies.
Seeing that text, the president of Planned Parenthood ran out of her office and joined her staff, gathered around television sets, clapping and crying, to revel in a moment of joy.
“It was a little bit unreal,” she recalls of the day’s emotions.
The decision in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt was a significant victory for abortion providers nationwide. And it came at a significant moment.
One hundred years after Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger began educating women about birth control in New York and 43 years after Roe v. Wade, the reproductive rights movement in America is at a pivotal crossroads. Facing hundreds of restrictive laws nationwide, abortion rights advocates are going on the offensive with a new strategy.
Gone is the vaguely conciliatory mantra of the past, the ideal of keeping abortion “safe, legal and rare” once advocated by Bill and Hillary Clinton. Today’s activists are bringing the passionately debated procedure into the light, encouraging women to talk openly about their abortions and giving the movement an unapologetic human face.
And they aren’t stopping there. Heading into a high-stakes presidential election, Planned Parenthood’s political arm and its supporters are rolling up their sleeves to help elect Hillary Clinton — who has done an about-face on the issue with a party platform that is pushing, for the first time , for full Medicaid funding for abortions.
It’s a bold move that positively courts controversy. But controversy has never stopped Cecile Richards.
“There’s this thought that women are just too scattered, we’re too impulsive, we are too hormonal, we can’t make good decisions for ourselves,” Richards says, sitting in a sterile, glass-walled conference room at Planned Parenthood’s headquarters. She’s talking about what she thinks lies at the root of the bitter debate over abortion.
She is, as always, immaculately put together, her tall frame draped in a merlot-colored sheath and matching cardigan, gold earrings twinkling beneath her short, white-blond hair. Her alto voice conveys the subtlest hint of a Texas twang, and more than a hint of sarcasm.
“Therefore we need the state to tell us, we need the state to give us medical information, even if it’s incorrect,” she says. “We need the state to give us an ultrasound because we must not really realize that we’re pregnant; we have to go away for 24 hours and think it over.”
She leans forward slightly and raises her voice: “Can you imagine if these kinds of restrictions were put on any other kind of health care in America?”
In person, the 59-year-old Richards exudes both a warm authenticity and a subtle impenetrability; there’s the sense that she means everything she says, but she isn’t saying everything. Her public persona is almost preternaturally controlled; like the savviest politicians, she’s supremely polished, perpetually on-message and surrounded by a highly protective media operation that carefully controls reporters’ access and circles the wagons when uncomfortable situations arise.
Which, given her job, they frequently do. As the president of the country’s largest abortion provider, Richards is a lightning rod for conflicting passions. Polarizing? The word could have been invented for her. It’s a safe bet that how you view her depends on where you stand on abortion: She’s composed, heroic, a righteous defender of the vulnerable; or she’s cold, unfeeling, a cunning apologist for baby murderers.
She gets standing ovations. She also gets death threats.
One thing, though, is indisputable: her success at creating a powerful political juggernaut — pretty close to “the largest kick-butt political organization” that she said she wanted to establish not long after she took the helm in 2006.
In a lineup of past presidents of Planned Parenthood, which has a separate political action committee, Richards stands out — her background isn’t in women’s health care. It’s in organizing and politics. And she has deployed her skills in those fields to win major battles for abortion rights.When the Susan G. Komen foundation announced that it would cut funding for breast cancer screenings at Planned Parenthood clinics in 2012, the organization sparked an outcry so fierce that Komen quickly backtracked. Last year, Planned Parenthood successfully turned back a challenge by an antiabortion group that shot undercover video purporting to show that the organization was illegally selling fetal tissue. Richards herself stared down hostile lawmakers bent on defunding her organization in a congressional hearing called after the videos surfaced.
Since Richards’s ascension, Planned Parenthood has also pointedly transformed its messaging and its public strategy. Two years ago, the organization officially — and shrewdly — shed the abortion-specific “pro-choice” label in favor of broader terms such as “reproductive rights” and “women’s health care.” Most notably, it started highlighting the day-to-day reality of abortion, encouraging women to come forward with their personal stories.
And lots of women are taking the leap. More than 200 shared their abortion experiences in public amicus briefs filed as part of Whole Woman’s Health.
“I have never been in a courtroom where women’s experiences were so prominent and so impossible to ignore,” Richards says.
For the activist extraordinaire, it’s all in a decade’s work. And it wins her major kudos from admirers.
Richards has “really transformed” Planned Parenthood, says Rep. Gwen Moore, a Wisconsin Democrat, and “turned it into the kind of political machine that has been necessary to not only fight back the bad policy positions, but to actually raise money.”
more
