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obituary
Cecile Richards, Reproductive Rights Champion Who Led Planned Parenthood, Dies at 67
"To honor her legacy and life, let's do everything we can in this moment to create the just world that everyone deserves," said former Texas lawmaker Wendy Davis.
Jan 20, 2025
Cecile Richards, the former president of Planned Parenthood and longtime champion of women's rights and other progressive causes, died on Monday at the age of 67. The cause was an aggressive brain cancer that had been diagnosed in 2023.
Richards' husband and three children confirmed her death in a statement posted on social media.
Richards, the daughter of forner Democratic Texas Gov. Ann Richards, had an early introduction to progressive politics. At 16 she worked on a campaign to elect Sarah Waddington, the lawyer who argued in favor of abortion rights before the U.S. Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade, and in college she helped push Brown University to divest from companies that supported apartheid in South Africa.
After years of labor organizing work, Richards became the president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. She sat at the helm of the organization for 12 years, leading it as it became more vocal in electoral politics and fought state-level battles against abortion restrictions.
She was the national face of the organization and spoke frequently on its behalf at political events and galas, but also stood shoulder-to-shoulder with abortion rights supporters at pivotal moments in the fight against right-wing efforts to attack reproductive justice.
In 2013, after then-Texas state Sen. Wendy Davis (D-10) made national headlines by spending 13 hours filibustering an omnibus bill that contained a host of anti-abortion measures, Richards rallied supporters in the state Capitol to yell loud enough to halt the Senate debate over the legislation—a move that Republican lawmakers later blamed for the bill's failure.
"That was vital," Dave Cortez of Occupy Austin toldThe Texas Tribune. "Her support really helped put it all together."
Davis called Richards "a light, a champion, a force for good" on Monday.
Calling her death "a heartbreaking loss," Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) said the former Planned Parenthood leader "spent her life on the front lines, fighting for women's rights throughout this country."
After leaving Planned Parenthood in 2018, Richards co-founded the progressive political mobilization group Supermajority and toured the nation speaking out against President Donald Trump's nomination of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
She also cofounded the chatbot Charley, which connects people seeking abortion care with reproductive health organizations, and Abortion in America, a project that publishes the personal stories of people who have obtained abortions since the Supreme Court overturned Roe in 2022.
"The only thing people respond to and remember are stories," Richards told The New York Times last October. "We have to figure out: How do you catch the attention of people that, even if they could find the article, don't have 20 minutes to read it?"
Richards' death was announced just hours before Trump, who has bragged about his role in overturning Roe and mocked the family of one woman who died after being unable to receive standard care under Georgia's abortion ban, was to be sworn in for his second term in office.
"As if today wasn't bad enough, the passing of Cecile Richards, former Planned Parenthood leader, is beyond tragic for all women in U.S," said former Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.). "Her powerful voice for women's freedom has been silenced. Rest in power, dear friend."
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said Richards "modeled guts and grit in public service, showing courage and fortitude beyond words as a champion of women's reproductive freedom."
In their statement, Richards' family asked that supporters who wish to honor her listen to "some New Orleans jazz, gather with friends and family over a good meal, and 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."
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Former President and Human Rights Champion Jimmy Carter Dies at 100
Carter served in the White House for four years and went on to work tirelessly for peace and human rights.
Dec 29, 2024
Former President Jimmy Carter, who served just four years in office and went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize for his decades of work promoting human rights and international peace, died on Sunday at his home in Plains, Georgia at the age of 100.
His death was confirmed by his son and came close to two years after the Carter Center announced that the former president had stopped medical treatment for health conditions and was entering hospice care.
Rights advocates have credited Carter for his championing of the rights of marginalized people including Palestinians, even as the U.S. political establishment remains overwhelmingly supportive of Israel's violent policies in Palestine.
"He was our greatest ex-president and a very good president despite GOP efforts to tarnish him," said James Zogby, founder of the Arab American Institute. "He was a peacemaker and a human rights champion. A humble man. He taught us how to live with principles and how to die with grace."
During his term, Carter helped to broker peace between Israel and Egypt, finalized a treaty that returned control of the Panama Canal to Panama, and signed an agreement with the Soviet Union to limit strategic weapons. But conservatives attacked him for presiding over a period of high unemployment and inflation, the Iran hostage crisis, and an energy crisis in which the price of oil tripled.
Carter was credited with being ahead of his time regarding environmental concerns—installing solar water heater panels on the White House that were later removed by his Republican successor.
"A generation from now,” he said at a televised event when the panels were installed, "this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people."
He lost his reelection campaign to Ronald Reagan in a landslide in 1980. As the Republican president set about promoting trickle-down economics, with lasting effects on corporate power and income inequality in the U.S., Carter turned his attention to building affordable housing with Habitat for Humanity and promoting human rights and peacemaking around the world.
With his wife Rosalynn—who died in November 2023—Carter established the Carter Center in the early 1980s. The organization's health programs have been credited with helping to cure and control diseasesincluding river blindness, trachoma, and Guinea worm disease in Africa, Latin America, and Asia.
Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 "for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts," including his leadership during the painstaking negotiations that ended decades of conflict between Egypt and Israel in 1978. In his acceptance speech, Carter warned against the invasion of Iraq.
He published the book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid in 2006, comparing Israel's treatment of Palestinians to apartheid in South Africa. The book was treated as controversial, but he vehemently defended its central argument.
"The word 'apartheid' is exactly accurate," he told Democracy Now! "Palestinians can't even ride on the same roads that Israelis have created in Palestinian territory... The Israelis completely dominate the life of the Palestinian people."
In October 2023, the Carter Center issued a statement saying there was "no military solution" to the conflict between Hamas and Israel, and demanded a cease-fire.
Carter also distinguished himself among former presidents by speaking out against the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, saying the U.S. had become an "oligarchy with unlimited political bribery."
"My father was a hero, not only to me but to everyone who believes in peace, human rights, and unselfish love," said Chip Carter, the former president's son. "My brothers, sister, and I shared him with the rest of the world through these common beliefs. The world is our family because of the way he brought people together, and we thank you for honoring his memory by continuing to live these shared beliefs."
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Former Sen. Fred Harris, Champion of Economic Populism, Dies at 94
"The fundamental problem is that too few people have all the money and power, and everybody else has too little of either," said Harris in 1975.
Nov 25, 2024
Former Oklahoma Senator Fred Harris, a moderate Democratic lawmaker who fully embraced economic populism in his later political career and ran what one journalist called a "proto-Bernie" presidential campaign in 1976, died on Saturday at the age of 94.
Harris' death inspired tributes from an array of Democratic politicians and progressives, who remembered the former senator's outspoken support for working people and his championing of Indigenous rights.
Harris was voted into the Senate to replace Sen. Robert Kerr (D-Okla.) in 1964 after Kerr died of a heart attack. He began as a close ally of President Lyndon Johnson, supporting U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and Johnson's Great Society programs aimed at reducing poverty.
But he "underwent a dramatic passage from moderate-conservative to liberal ideas," as The New York Times reported, embracing a "new populism" that was centered on promoting racial equality and a redistribution of economic and political power and fighting against the exploitation of workers. He also gradually changed his stance on Vietnam, calling for troop reductions and eventually a full withdrawal of the U.S. military in the region.
In 1967 he was a member of the Kerner Commission on Civil Disorders, convened to determine the root cause of riots in Black communities across the country. He concluded that "entrenched racism" was to blame.
He was also credited with sponsoring a bill that pushed President Richard Nixon to return Blue Lake, a site that was sacred to the people of the Taos Pueblo tribe, to them.
"In Senator Harris, Oklahoma sent a public servant to Washington, D.C. who gave voice to those in need, lifted up those the economy left behind, was a champion of civil rights, and was a friend to Indian Country," said Chief Chuck Hoskin, Jr. of the Cherokee Nation.
"His story is one that too few people know—the story of an Oklahoman who championed working families and fought for justice and equity at every turn."
Running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976, Harris called for higher taxes on the richest Americans and lower taxes for the rest of the country, stricter regulations on large corporations, a "moral" foreign policy, abortion rights, and "community control" of police forces.
Columnist John Nichols of The Nation said Harris adopted the slogan "No More Bullshit" during his presidential campaign.
Harris' presidential bid, said journalist Ryan Grim of Drop Site News, "was a road-not-taken that would have led to a much better world than we have now."
Harris told the Times in 1975 that the issue he was most concerned with was "privilege."
"The fundamental problem is that too few people have all the money and power, and everybody else has too little of either," he said. "The widespread diffusion of economic and political power ought to be the express goal—the stated goal—of government."
Harris' campaign garnered enthusiastic support from many voters, with the former senator taking aim at "the superrich, giant corporations" and leading efforts to gain the confidence of blue-collar workers, farmers, poor Black and white voters, and unemployed people.
"Those in the coalition don't have to love one another," Harris said. "All they have to do is recognize that they are commonly exploited, and that if they get themselves together they are a popular majority and can take back the government."
After his presidential run, Harris became a political science professor at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque and left politics to raise chickens on a farm in Corrales, New Mexico.
In conversations with Axios reporter Russell Contreras in his later years, Harris expressed frustration with the Democratic Party, saying leaders didn't discuss poverty as much as they should.
"It's harder to get out of poverty today than it was back then," he told Contreras.
He added that showing a commitment to fight for working-class and low-income people would motivate people in Appalachia, the Mississippi Delta, and on Native American reservations across the country.
"We are grateful to see national media highlighting the life and legacy of former Senator Fred Harris," said the Oklahoma Democratic Party. "His story is one that too few people know—the story of an Oklahoman who championed working families and fought for justice and equity at every turn."
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