We Carry Her With Us
By Christine Charbonneau
A giant in our movement is gone, and we are facing the worst of times. Today, though, as I virtually attended Cecile’s Memorial Celebration of Life, I felt steel infusing my spine.
Shortly after Bill Clinton became President in 1993, I stepped into my role as CEO of Planned Parenthood in Seattle. Cecile was working for the Ted Turner Foundation and called to inform me that our local Planned Parenthood and the NARAL Chapter, led by Karen Cooper (now the Treasurer of the ReproHub Board), had been awarded a grant for our collaborative work. Cecile was gracious, kind, funny, and supportive of our efforts.
A few years later, it was a pleasure to learn that she had been chosen by the Planned Parenthood Federation of America Board to lead the national organization.
One of her first acts as the new CEO was to gather a group of affiliate CEOs and ask what we needed. We told her we would handle the medical operations, but we needed her to represent Planned Parenthood on the national level and ensure Congress understood the importance of our organization to the most vulnerable. And represent she did.
This began a long and fruitful era during which millions of couples had their contraceptive needs met in clinics, contraception was covered in the ACA, Planned Parenthood Online went live to serve people worldwide, and in America, abortion rights reached their pinnacle in 2016 with the Supreme Court’s decision in Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt.
Sometimes Cecile and I were on opposite sides of a debate about tactics, about how we would get to a goal, but we were always united in our goals and mission. In the end, we celebrated the wonderful outcomes together.
Cecile was especially good at celebration, which is why her celebration of life has been just that. A Dixieland band set the tone. It also reminds me of Cecile’s playful side—I will never forget her getting on stage to sing “I’ll Take You There” with Mavis Staples, dancing at every gala, and once introducing us to a local Texas crooner as she sang along with every word.
On the play hard, work hard continuum, her workdays were unimaginable. Once, we traveled together for a colleague’s retirement party in Connecticut. After a full day at the office, we went to the train station, bumped into ACLU CEO Antony Ramirez and chatted, talked on the train all the way to Connecticut, and upon our arrival, while I was enjoying my first glass of wine, she was pulled into a side room to face a bank of national news media cameras to respond to something that had happened that day. She lived like that for almost two decades.
We worked in New York, New Orleans, Florida, and Alaska. One day, Cecile and I found ourselves in an enclosure with puppies in our arms after an event at the workplace of a supporter who was an Alaska Dog Sledding aficionado. She was as at home sitting on a bale of hay with puppies as she was at a gala or White House reception.
I stood next to her when the toughest customers in our donor base were brought to tears to be in a room with her. Stories of their work with her mother abounded. Her family had a legacy among progressives, and Cecile upheld her generation’s part of that. Her children are doing the same.
After my 40 years with Planned Parenthood and the unthinkable Dobbs decision, I started a podcast, The Fall of Roe, to assess the rapidly changing laws around the country (Blue States getting stronger while Red States were throwing reproductive health care, HIPAA, and civil rights under the bus). I wanted to help rally voters to turn out for the statewide ballot initiatives we would need to fight to protect women’s access to abortion. Cecile was kind enough to be my very first guest. You can listen to that episode here.
Kansas’s election results showed that Cecile and the thousands she led had, during her tenure, done everything possible to win the hearts and minds of the American people to our cause.
By then, we knew she had a brain tumor. It did not dampen her spirits, energy, or commitment to making the planet better for everyone. She is gone now, but those of us who had the pleasure of knowing her remain. We will, each in our own way, carry on where she left off.
Please join us in supporting Cecile’s work:
Abortion in America, Charley, Supermajority
More on Cecile Richards:
News From the States, Planned Parenthood, family statement on X