Cecile Richards, former president of Planned Parenthood, dies at age 67

Tall and elegant, she was an engaging, charismatic speaker. “She spoke to you, rather than at you,” journalist and novelist Anna Quindlen said in an interview Monday, “a kind of authenticity with a touch of Texas.”

During her 12-year tenure, Ms. Richards orchestrated Planned Parenthood’s evolution into a potent political organization and the nation’s largest provider of reproductive and sexual health care for women. She grew her base of supporters and volunteers from 2.5 to 11 million. From the time President Trump was first elected in 2016 until the beginning of 2018, Planned Parenthood added 700,000 new donors, a record for such a short period of time.

Yet it was during her tenure that the organization became increasingly exposed as her home state led the charge to defund Planned Parenthood, preventing clinics from offering state-funded programs that included birth control, breast and cervical cancer screenings and HIV prevention. Texas finally stripped the organization of its funding altogether, resulting in the closing of hundreds of clinics.

Since 1977, Congress, under the Hyde Amendment, has prohibited the use of federal funds for abortion, except in cases of rape or incest or to save the life of the mother. But as Ms. Richards stated again and again, abortions were a tiny fraction of the health care services that Planned Parenthood affiliates provided to women, and cutting any of its funding, she said, would affect those most in need the.

Then, in 2015, in a sting operation set up by an anti-abortion activist, Planned Parenthood employees in California were videotaped explaining how the organization offered fetal tissue to researchers, even though the activists falsely claimed that Planned Parenthood was selling the tissue for profit, which is illegal. The videos ignited a firestorm among conservatives and a contentious congressional hearing to investigate Planned Parenthood’s practices. Mrs. Richards responded with a video of her own, attacking the false allegations and apologizing for the employees’ apparent lack of compassion.