Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards is not buying Ivanka Trump’s claims that she’s an advocate for women’s rights.
Richards appeared on a panel discussion at the New York Times‘ Women in the World Summit on Wednesday night, where interviewer Katie Couric asked her to comment on Ivanka Trump’s stance on women’s issues. Couric cited a recent interview with the first daughter where, when asked about her silence on reproductive rights and other issues, Trump responded, “I would say not to conflate lack of public denouncement with silence.”
Pointing out that Trump recently took on an official role as assistant to the president, making her “one of the highest-ranking women” in the administration, Richards said: “Anyone who works in this White House is responsible for addressing why women are in the crosshairs of basically every single policy that we’ve seen out of this administration.”
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“Women should ask are we better or worse off than we were three months ago, and I think without a question, we’re a lot worse off,” Richards charged, pointing to “attacks on women’s health care” and proposed policies that would allow insurers to deny coverage to people with pre-existing conditions and result in higher insurance costs for women.
The Planned Parenthood leader also invoked the much-tweeted image of Vice President Mike Pence and a room full of white, male legislators “basically deciding that women didn’t need to get maternity care anymore in this country.”
Richards’ remarks are particularly interesting in light of a Politico report that Ivanka Trump had reached out to Richards for a meeting soon after her father’s inauguration, but that the relationship quickly soured as the president backed a GOP health care bill that would have defunded Planned Parenthood for one year.