Cecile Richards is a Woman of the Year because…"She is fighting for each and every one of us. I would follow her into a burning building and still not be half as brave as she is."
—actress and writer Lena Dunham, 2012 Woman of the Year
Won't Back Down: "Growing up, Mom always told me: You will never receive the kind of gratification that you get when someone looks you in the eye and says, 'Thank you for helping make my life better,' " says Richards, near her New York City office.
On the bustling sidewalks of Times Square in New York City, where even big-screen-famous faces often go unnoticed, Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, can hardly walk a block without being stopped by a passerby. As she stood at a busy crosswalk near her office on the fall day Glamour interviewed her, a young man approached to shake her hand and offer a few appreciative words. A businesswoman rushed up to say, "Thank you for all that you do." Richards explains it this way: "Pretty much everyone remembers where they were, what they were doing when they went to Planned Parenthood. To hear their stories—it's a reminder that we change people's lives every day."
The daughter of a civil rights lawyer dad and a politician mom (the late Texas governor Ann Richards), she has been an organizer since her days at Brown University, where she missed graduation to protest South African apartheid. ("Somebody had to unfurl the banner from the second-story window!" she says with a laugh.) In her thirties, Richards helped run her mother's campaign while pregnant with twins; after that, she went on to launch both the Texas Freedom Network, to advocate for better public school education, and America Votes, which works to ensure voting rights for all.
Then, 10 years ago, came the opportunity to apply for what turned out to be the most important job of her life: leading Planned Parenthood. "I almost didn't go to the interview," admits Richards, now 58. "I'd never run anything that big. I'm like a lot of women: We think we have to be perfect in every way. And so it's hard for us to take chances and do things where we think we might not measure up. [But] I remembered the most important lesson my mother taught me. She said, 'This is the only life you have. You have one chance to make a difference in the world. There are no do-overs. So do it now.' "
Today Richards oversees a federation with more than 10,000 employees at 700 Planned Parenthood centers across the country. (She also helms their Action Fund.) Even in the face of deep state and federal funding cuts, the organization remains one of the largest reproductive health care providers in the nation. Abortion services constitute 3 percent of the care it provides—meaning that, yes, Planned Parenthood is where roughly 300,000 women will choose to terminate a pregnancy in any given year, often because it is the only place in their state they can do so. But those same health centers also administer more than 10 million medical services yearly—the majority to women and teenagers living in rural or medically underserved areas. That includes 4.5 million tests and treatments for sexually transmitted infections, and nearly a million screenings for breast and cervical cancer. One in every five women has visited a Planned Parenthood in her lifetime; a full 10 percent of patients are men.
"For a woman to have any power in this world, or any moral authority, she needs to be in charge of her own body—her own physical being," says Gloria Feldt, Richards' predecessor in the president job and a 2003 Woman of the Year. "Enabling women to plan their childbearing allows them to be full and equal citizens in every sense of the word: in family, in the economy, in politics, period…. Planned Parenthood is not an organization. It is an idea about giving women an equal place in this world."
Richards has worked hard on behalf of that idea. She says her best day on the job yet was in 2013, when, after years of laboring to get insurers—many of whom were paying for Viagra and vasectomies for men—to cover birth control for women, President Obama called to say that her effort had paid off: From that day forward, virtually every woman's contraception would be covered by every health insurer. "Fifty million women, finally getting their family planning covered?" says Richards. "It was a revolution for women."
But controversy around these issues reached fever pitch in 2015. (As columnist Gail Collins put it in The New York Times this fall: "Being at the helm of Planned Parenthood in the current climate is more like steering a boat carrying unstable explosives…while surrounded on both sides by enemy pirates throwing burning torches.") This summer pro-choice and pro-life Americans alike were unsettled by the release of videos charging that the organization improperly handles fetal tissue donations for medical research. Investigations soon proved that it does not, and that the videos were deceptively edited. But some lawmakers were outraged, renewing calls to defund Planned Parenthood, even though no government money goes to its abortion services except in rare cases like rape or incest. The threat only galvanized the organization's supporters: On September 29, millions of fans—including Scarlett Johansson, Gabrielle Union, and Julianne Moore—showed their support by putting on hot pink T-shirts and gathering in parks around the country, tweeting, "#IStandWithPP" as Richards herself stood up to testify before the (79 percent male) House Oversight Committee. "We're proud of the health care that we deliver every single year," she told lawmakers.
One sympathetic listener in the room was Representative Tammy Duckworth (D–Ill.), a Purple Heart–decorated Iraq War veteran and new mother: "When I was in college and working two jobs and had no other health care, I turned to Planned Parenthood," Rep. Duckworth told Glamour. "So I was frustrated to see so many of my colleagues launch politicized attacks during that hearing. But I wasn't surprised in the least to see Cecile take it in stride. She has exhibited great leadership, remaining focused on one true mission: providing high-quality health care to low-income families across the country."
The recent bid to defund Planned Parenthood was blocked by the Senate, but opponents in Washington aren't giving up. As Glamour went to press, the same House lawmakers were advancing similar legislation. If they are successful, top health experts say, the outcome for women could be disastrous. A Congressional Budget Office analysis found that if Planned Parenthood were stripped of federal financing, nearly 700,000 people who use its services could lose access to their only source of health care. "It would be devastating," says Georges C. Benjamin, M.D., executive director of the American Public Health Association. "Community health centers are not able to absorb a loss of care of this magnitude."
It would all be quite a weight for one woman to carry on her shoulders, but Richards doesn't feel alone. "There's not a mother in the world who wants her daughter to have fewer rights than she did—and for me, it's the 2.7 million people Planned Parenthood serves each year who make everything I advocate for possible," she says. "Women, men, and young people deserve quality health care and fundamental rights. I will do this job every day to protect them."
HER WORDS TO LIVE BY: "If you want to make real social change, you have to be willing for folks to fight you on it. You just have to move forward on the things you believe in."
*Genevieve Field is a *Glamour contributing editor.
See All of the 2015 Glamour Women of the Year Honorees »
