Legend has it that when Bette Davis learned from a reporter of the death of her nemesis, Joan Crawford, Davis responded that “you should never say bad things about the dead, only good. Joan Crawford is dead. Good.” I had the same reaction when I learned of the welcome demise this past week of Cecile Richards, Planned Parenthood’s priestess of death, though I quickly reconsidered. Why should I not speak badly of such an awful person?
History will likely not remember Richards much, beyond a Wikipedia page and some archived website clippings. But I think it important in the moment to acknowledge what a truly awful person Richards was, if only to confront the evil that abortion is.
Let us be clear: while abortions continue unabated since the overturn of Roe v. Wade, the death of Cecile Richards marks the end of an era that, by any fair estimation, was one of the most odious chapters in American social history. As the president of Planned Parenthood, Richards represented not merely the hollow triumph of a movement predicated on euphemisms and half-truths but the grotesque commodification of human life itself. Her tenure was not marked by courage, compassion, or even the faintest semblance of moral introspection; it was defined by a kind of cheerful barbarism, the type of which a debased nation celebrates and at which a virtuous one recoils.
Richards embodied an ideology so terminally self-assured that it crossed into the macabre. Hers was not the clinical detachment of a bureaucrat — that would be bad enough — but the zealous fervor of a true believer, someone who could state into the cameras with her icy eyes and present infanticide as empowerment with the moral gravity of a high school pep rally. There was a studied cruelty to her advocacy, an unflinching capacity to treat the fragile beating hearts of the unborn as little more than collateral damage in the service of “choice.” To call her tenure as president of Planned Parenthood an exercise in nihilism would be a compliment; nihilism, after all, requires at least a passing engagement with philosophy.
One is reminded, when considering Richards’s unrelenting pursuit of the dehumanization of the unborn, of Dante’s vision of the Inferno. There, in Canto XXV, the poet describes souls so debased, so thoroughly untethered from their humanity, that they have abandoned their bodies entirely to enter Hell prematurely, leaving their bodies mere vessels walking the earth, soulless automatons animated by the basest instincts. It is an image that lingers, not least because it captures so well the peculiar moral vacuity of someone like Richards. What can one say of a person who has not merely abandoned moral principles but weaponized that abandonment as a virtue?
Under Richards’s leadership, Planned Parenthood became the industrialized apex of cruelty. Its clinics, draped in the Orwellian language of “health care,” operated as conveyor belts for death. She stood atop this ghastly empire with all the unearned charisma of a third-rate autocrat, glibly brushing aside accusations of malpractice and profiteering. The most damning evidence against her — those notorious undercover videos showing the organization’s cavalier trafficking of fetal remains — was dismissed by Richards and her supporters as little more than “heavily edited” agitprop. And even if they had been, would the unedited truth have been any better? The banality of evil has never been more efficiently packaged.
Richards was not merely an advocate for abortion rights; she was their apotheosis. She was a priestess of death, a curator of despair, selling the lie that human autonomy must necessarily include the power to erase another’s existence. Her ideology, so far from being grounded in genuine feminism, relied on the cynical calculation that women could only be empowered by shedding their most primal and noble instinct: the nurturing of life. In Richards’s dystopian worldview, maternity was not a blessing but a burden, a condition to be “cured” rather than celebrated.
It is tempting to dismiss Cecile Richards as a product of her time, a mere cog in the larger machinery of a culture that has abandoned its soul in pursuit of convenience. But this would be to let her off too lightly. Richards was not a passive participant in the decline of Western civilization; she was an architect, its champion, its grotesque avatar. She did not merely reflect the age; she defined it.
Her death, then, is not a cause for sorrow, as it is hard to summon sorrow for someone who so gleefully rejected the sacred. It is a moment for reflection on the depths to which a society can sink when it chooses comfort over conscience, convenience over conviction. Richards has shuffled off this mortal coil, leaving behind a legacy of ash and bone and body parts, a trail of discarded lives sacrificed at the altar of progress. She has, in death, earned her rightful place in the pantheon of history’s moral reprobates, alongside those whose crimes were not merely against individuals but against the very essence of humanity.
If there is any justice in the hereafter — and praise God there is — Dante’s vision is not merely allegorical but prophetic. There is, after all, a particularly dark Hell reserved for those who visit evil on the smallest and more vulnerable: as Christ reminds us, whatsoever you do unto the least of these, so have you done unto me. One can only hope that Richards now has the clarity of vision that eluded her in life. Perhaps, in the suffocating darkness and inexorable torment of that infernal circle, she might finally understand the magnitude of the evil she wrought.
Rest in peace, Cecile, in Hell.
