This is horrifying to me. I know it’s supposed to be all inspiring because despite her diagnosis, Cecile Richards is continuing her life’s work. Her life’s work, unfortunately, is death.
New York Magazine: Six months ago, on a family vacation in Maine, Cecile Richards, the long-serving president of Planned Parenthood, discovered that her hand had seemingly forgotten how to write. Alarmed, she and her husband, Kirk Adams, drove back to New York and, eventually, went to the ER at NYU. As Richards was getting wheeled into surgery for a brain tumor two days later, her eldest daughter, Lily, an assistant secretary for public affairs at the U.S. Treasury Department, was in labor at another hospital. By the time mother and daughter were each discharged, Richards, 66, had her first grandchild and a diagnosis of glioblastoma: incurable brain cancer for which the median survival rate is 15 months.
“Teddy is getting hair,” she says cheerfully of her grandson when we meet at the Financial District co-working space where she is still strategizing for the abortion “war effort,” as she calls it. Richards is publicly divulging her illness for the first time. She gestures toward her lavender head wrap, which has replaced her signature sideswept, white-blonde pixie cut: “And I’m losing it.”
Always rangy and elegant, she’s a bit thinner now. The Texas drawl is more halting, but thanks to speech therapy and good fortune, Richards has remained remarkably cogent. She tells me she’s learning to write again; she’s still ahead of the baby on that.
It’s the second day of the Arctic blast that broke the city’s two-year snowless streak, and on her way here, Richards found herself stranded at the West 4th Street station. She chose to walk the icy sidewalks south even though, she tells me as we navigate the co-working space’s disorienting glass loop, “what I cannot do is fall.” Only the day before, Richards was getting treatment at Sloan Kettering. Today, she is hard at work on Charley, a bot she co-created that helps abortion seekers get good information on how to safely end their pregnancies. She has lined up three hours of nearly uninterrupted meetings that would leave someone without cancer tired. It’s hard not to feel that Richards isn’t trying to prove something just to her colleagues but also to herself.
“Cecile is a high-expectations, high-performance person,” Adams tells me dryly. “Sometimes in extremes.” Her younger daughter, Hannah, says that before her mother got sick, it wasn’t enough for her to insist the family hike the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu; they had to go back and do the tougher Salkantay Trail — in a hailstorm.
Running Planned Parenthood for 12 years, growing it by leaps, establishing it as a star in the Democratic Party firmament, staring down House Republicans as they leveled flagrant attacks on the organization — all required stoic endurance. But those days look tame now. Roe fell four years after she left the most prominent job in reproductive rights. The aftermath has surfaced criticism of national pro-choice organizations for being too white and too timid, and of Planned Parenthood in particular for allegedly putting its pragmatic interests ahead of feminist goals. Abortion access has been wiped out in nearly half the country, and GOP officials are foaming at the mouth to prosecute anyone who helps someone get an abortion and forcing women to bleed out in order to get emergency care. Nearly one in five patients is now traveling out of state to get an abortion, and that is the kind who can get out. An untold number are getting pills online, legally and not so legally. And Richards has brain cancer.
All of this means, to Richards, that there’s no time to waste. There’s Charley — whose name is meant to convey a friend of indeterminate gender — which has had 16,000 visits in its first four months. She wants to document what’s happening on the ground in abortion-ban states. She still talks to politicians and activists and organizers and organization presidents. When I ask her why she’s so committed to continuing to work, Richards says, “What was Mom’s line?” Mom being the late Ann Richards, the legendary Texas governor and last Democrat to run the state. “Why should your life only be about you?”
I would beg of her to reconsider her life’s work. Consider that the world was created as an act of love and we should act as conduits for that love in the world. I sincerely pray for Cecile Richards.
If she were to repent, how happy Heaven would be.
