“Little lady, you are just trying to make trouble.”
That’s the first sentence of Cecile Richards’ memoir, “Make Trouble: Standing Up, Speaking Out, and Finding the Courage to Lead.”
Cecile Richards, the former leader of Planned Parenthood and ardent abortion rights defender who died at age 67 on Monday of glioblastoma, made only the best trouble. Cecile accepted the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s 2018 Forward Award, which recognizes individuals who have moved society forward.
I was a bit nervous about moderating the on-stage conversation Cecile requested for her convention appearance, but what a privilege it was. In introducing her, I recited some of my favorite quotes from her book, which included her advice: “Get comfortable with making others uncomfortable.” My first question was to ask her to explain that intriguing opening sentence of her book.
“I was in sixth grade,” Cecile responded, “and my teacher decided to open every day with the Lord’s Prayer, which I neither knew the words to or wanted to recite.” Cecile told her teacher, “That’s not what we do in my family.” Her teacher replied, “Are you just trying to make trouble?” Cecile said that she “realized I really wasn’t trying to make trouble, but if she thought I was, then I guess I was and that was OK. And it sort of stuck.”
(Read or watch here FFRF’s conversation with Cecile Richards. She was also a guest on FFRF’s TV show, “Freethought Matters.”)
Cecile had an amazing pedigree as a good troublemaker, freethinker, feminist and progressive. As a teenager, the intrepid daughter of the intrepid Ann Richards (the plainspoken first woman governor of Texas) helped Sarah Weddington (who argued Roe v. Wade) win a seat in the Texas House. Cecile became a labor organizer, assisted in getting her mother elected, and then, seeing the dangers of the Christian Coalition, founded the Texas Freedom Network, which is still going strong. Felicia Martin, president of Texas Freedom Network, said in a statement, “As we find ourselves in a moment not dissimilar to 1995, where religious extremism and a loud, vitriolic minority continue to chip away at our freedoms and attack our communities, we at TFN are honored to carry on the vital mission of the organization that Cecile so graciously started 30 years ago.”
Cecile then became such an effective deputy chief of staff to Rep. Nancy Pelosi that Pelosi once said of her, “She should be president.” If only. Never resting on her laurels, Cecile next founded America Votes, which is also still going strong. And, of course, she served for 12 years as president of The Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
Remembrances of Cecile uniformly recall her elegance and poise. Ilyse Hogue, formerly president of NARAL Pro-Choice America (now Reproductive Freedom for All), writes that through the brutal attacks on Planned Parenthood and abortion rights, “Cecile never flinched.” When she appeared before our national convention, Cecile had recently retired from Planned Parenthood but not from activism.
Even while she fought a grueling cancer, Cecile was still speaking out, such as on behalf of Vice President Kamala Harris at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, and founding organizations that make a difference. These include Charley, a chatbot to aid individuals in finding abortion health care, and a media project called Abortion in America. It utilizes Instagram, TikTok and other social media to publicize the personal stories that show how abortion bans are hurting real women.
In an interview that ran posthumously in the Texas Observer about Abortion in America, Cecile said, “I really believe the only way we are going to change this country and create understanding and empathy is by storytelling. … While there is so much incredible reporting on the impact of abortion bans on patients, the stories only last in the public’s mind for maybe a week if we’re lucky, then kind of just disappear. My mother always said, ‘It’s only when you get sick of repeating something that people are really starting to hear it,’ and I really believe that is true.”
My own mother, Anne Nicol Gaylor, an early abortion rights activist who went on to become the principal founder of FFRF, would have assented. Anne spoke daily for more than 30 years with callers seeking abortion funding through the other charity she founded, the Women’s Medical Fund, and always lamented the fact that women and their life experiences were being ignored in the abortion debate. Cecile warned in that last interview that, in addition to demanding we hear the experiences of those needing abortion care, “We also need to prepare people for a long fight in all 50 states.”
Cecile told me during our interview, “What we are experiencing now in this country is the last gasp of the patriarchy seeing that its time is almost over.” And that she realized, after her mother’s gubernatorial reelection defeat, “That … instead of just being despondent, that we needed to organize.”
Cecile gave a gracious endorsement of FFRF in accepting our award. “When did this idea come up that there was one true way, one true religion?” Cecile asked. “Of course, religion was being used to go after women’s rights, to go after LGBTQ rights. It’s happening again more and more, and I’m so grateful for what you all do because [of] the hypocrisy of the evangelical community standing with a president who has thrown in their face every single tenet of what they purport to believe. If there were ever a time to really unmask the danger to people of having religion dictate government, this is it.” How unfortunate that her caveat in 2018 remains just as timely today.
Her husband and three children made a poignant statement urging that we “remember something she said a lot over the last year: It’s not hard to imagine future generations one day asking, ‘When there was so much at stake for our country, what did you do?’ The only acceptable answer is: ‘Everything we could.’”
Cecile Richards did absolutely everything she could to help improve and save our democracy. We must do everything we can to keep making trouble: standing up, speaking out and finding the courage to lead.
Disclaimer: The views in this column are of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
