For Cecile Richards, 2016 is a year of milestones. It marks her tenth year as president of Planned Parenthood, the well-known and oft-embattled women’s healthcare provider. It’s also the organization’s centennial.
In town recently to help a Sarasota facility celebrate its 50th, and to attend an event for Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton, she sat down with CL to talk about how far women’s healthcare has come and how far the right wants to set the clock back.
There’s a lot of debate over whether Clinton or her rival, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, would be better for women. What makes you support Clinton for president?
CR: She [has] really worked very hard in concert with others to get children’s health insurance coverage in this country, which is now kind of a given. There’s 8 million children who are now insured… She never asked us what she should do or waited for someone to call. She literally was proactive on so many issues… She and Patty Murray, the senator from Washington state, are really the reason that we got emergency contraception for women over the counter. They held up a judicial nomination and said we are not going to move things forward until we get the FDA approval. She introduced eight separate bills while she was in the Senate to advance women’s reproductive rights. That’s eight more than anyone [else] who’s running for president.
Clinton has long been the subject of harsh attacks from both the right and the left. Do you think part of that is because she’s a woman?
Absolutely. Without a doubt. The double standard for women in every way… it’s not only true in politics, it’s true in a lot of parts of our lives. I raised three children, I worked all my life, and I’m not different than a lot of other women. You never feel like you can do everything well enough. And Hillary’s worked so hard all her life to advance women and women’s rights, and that’s why I think she keeps going.
You talk about the progress you helped usher along when it comes to women’s health and women’s issues in general. But Planned Parenthood and other care providers are being attacked at both the state and federal level. Is the struggle now just an attempt to keep the dialogue on women’s healthcare from going backward in time?
We’re in, I think, some outrageous fights right now. The fact that we are still fighting about issues, about safe and legal abortion, about access to birth control, is incredible to me. But our founder was thrown in jail for handing out pamphlets about birth control a hundred years ago. The story was, she was thrown in jail, she told all of her fellow inmates about birth control, and they sort of launched a movement. And I think that’s where Planned Parenthood has always been, on the cutting edge, demanding and fighting for access to sexual and reproductive healthcare… We continue to fight those battles and I don’t want to minimize any of them, but sometimes you also have to understand, when you’re fighting for social justice and you’re fighting for equal rights, it’s not always just a straight trajectory… but I do think we are at this moment of inflection in America about whether women are in fact going to be equal parts of society. And we’re going to build on eight years under President Obama, where we’ve actually been able to make enormous progress, or whether we’ll go back to the 1950s and start all
over again.
This article appears in Mar 3-9, 2016.