Tall and elegant, she was an engaging, charismatic speaker. “She spoke to you, rather than at you,” the journalist and novelist Anna Quindlen said in an interview on Monday, “a kind of authenticity with a touch of Texas.”
During her 12-year-term, Ms. Richards orchestrated Planned Parenthood’s evolution into a potent political organization and the country’s largest provider of reproductive and women’s sexual health care. She grew its base of supporters and volunteers from 2.5 to 11 million. From the time President Trump was first elected in 2016, until early 2018, Planned Parenthood added 700,000 new donors, a record for so short a period.
Yet it was during her tenure that the organization became increasingly embattled, as her home state led the charge to defund Planned Parenthood, barring clinics from offering state-funded programs that included contraception, breast and cervical cancer screenings, and H.I.V. prevention. Texas finally stripped the organization of its funding altogether, resulting in the closing of hundreds of clinics.
Since 1977, under the Hyde Amendment, Congress has banned 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 declared over and over, abortions were a small fraction of the health-care services that Planned Parenthood affiliates provided to women, and reducing any of its funding, she said, would impact those who needed it the most.
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, 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. Ms. Richards responded with a video of her own, assailing the false allegations and apologizing for the employees’ seeming lack of compassion.
