NEW YORK—Abortion is exactly the kind of debate Democrats don’t want right now: visceral, internally divisive, and more about hypotheticals than any actual candidate or race.

And, as with just about every other issue for a party in frantic panic over ever being in power again, it’s about whether the way to win is to proudly and unequivocally take a stand, or to decide they’ve already veered too far toward ideological purity and correct course.


The latest round of infighting was inadvertently kicked off by Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair Rep. Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, who said in an interview at the beginning of the month that abortion wouldn’t be a “litmus test” in backing candidates for next year’s existential battle for the House majority.

Abortion rights activists erupted, and Cecile Richards, the president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and Planned Parenthood Action Fund, couldn’t be clearer on how wrong she thinks Luján is. “It’s a shocking sort of misunderstanding of actually where the country is … which is overwhelmingly supportive of abortion rights and also, who are the ground troops that kind of fuel the election of candidates,” Richards told me in an interview at her office in Lower Manhattan.

Democrats like Luján argue that to win back the conservative areas it has lost, the party will need to be flexible and let candidates break with liberal orthodoxy—including on hot-button national issues like abortion—in order to win. To Richards, that isn’t just wrong on principle, it’s dense on politics.

“Fundamentally, perhaps [what] he’s missing is, people can distinguish between their own personal feelings and what they believe government or politicians should do. And people even in some of the most conservative areas of the country who may themselves personally say, ‘I would never choose to have an abortion,’ or, ‘That’s not something that’s right for me,’ also, absolutely do not believe politicians should be making decisions about pregnancy for women,” Richards argues. “I think he’s totally wrong, and I’ll use every opportunity to convince him of that.”

Abortion keeps flaring up for Democrats. It overtook the unity tour that Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) did in April, after they backed a candidate for mayor of Omaha, Nebraska, who’d co-sponsored several abortion restriction bills in the state legislature. Now the DNC says there’s no question about the party’s position—“our party is pro-choice, it’s written into our platform, we believe that reproductive rights are economic rights,” says new DNC CEO Jess O’Connell—but in May, Perez hosted anti-choice Democrats at the party headquarters.

“There are going to be instances where not every one of our candidates will lead on every plank of our platform, but we’re not the ones trying to roll back reproductive rights,” O’Connell explains.

Perez also hosted frustrated representatives from several dozen women’s groups in May, though a Democratic official says what they were mostly complaining about was including Sanders in a unity tour at all.

Richards was much more conciliatory toward Sanders. She’s had “many conversations” with the Vermont senator since his comments in the spring, she says, adding, “it’s rare to see a candidate these days be successful because they oppose access to safe and legal abortion," and, in fact, candidates are “usually elected despite that fact, not because of it.”

Click here to subscribe to the full episode, to hear Richards discuss what she sees as the future of the Obamacare fight, whether she feels safe when people recognize her on the street, and what happened when she was called to the Obama White House immediately after Merrick Garland was nominated to the Supreme Court.

Democratic strategists and old party hands disagree. Winning, they say, requires reaching out to voters who’ve turned against them, many of whom view the abortion issue very differently. They see several of their wins in the 2006 wave, for example, as the result of being willing to have a tent big enough for abortion opponents, like former Rep. Jason Altmire from Trump-friendly Western Pennsylvania, or Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey, hoping to win reelection next year in a state that swung hard for the president.

Luján—who has a perfect voting record by Planned Parenthood scoring, and was touted for it during the House deliberations on Obamacare repeal—declined an interview, but he provided a statement he asked me to print in full in the hopes of calming his critics. He’s called Richards several times since his initial comment but so far hasn’t connected.

“My record of protecting a woman’s health care, her right to choose and her economic security is consistent with the fundamental tenets of the Democratic Party, and those values are at risk each day that Republicans control Washington. We must take back the House so that Democrats can legislate on the principles that our party holds dear,” he wrote. “Primary voters will ask candidates where they stand on the issues and elect their Democratic nominees, and everyone must decide whether to support that Democrat over the Republican in the general election. The DCCC will fight every day to defeat as many Republicans as possible and take back the House.”

That’s old thinking, say some of the party’s new leaders—who agree with Richards that Democrats would demoralize more voters than they’d pick up if they fudged the abortion issues, and do better even with voters who don’t agree with them by clearly articulating themselves.

But Democrats are also in no mood to compromise on what they see as their core values.

“We’re not going back to the days of being lukewarm on choice,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said to cheers Saturday at the Netroots Nation gathering of progressives in Atlanta.

O’Connell says she hopes the white supremacists and neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville over the weekend have clarified the stakes for the party, to push them away from these internal fights. “Those torches were lit, but they were lit months and weeks ago with the rhetoric coming out of Republicans—and I would much rather be talking about the economy, jobs, but also standing up for the values we support as Democrats.”

Richards’ larger point is that the Washington debate on abortion is out of date and out of touch with the rest of the country, with polls showing a trend toward higher support for abortion rights and against restrictions among most groups of voters. “Once you have a right for more than 40 years, people begin to assume that that’s actually established law,” she says, referring to the Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision.

But it’s Washington and officials in state capitals that have her worried: She “absolutely” thinks the high court could overturn Roe if President Donald Trump gets more conservative justices confirmed, and, in the meantime, she fears the march of state laws like a Texas bill to require women to pay an extra insurance premium for abortion coverage.

That’s happening in an environment where every already politically charged issue is supercharged, and where Planned Parenthood’s federal funds have become a consistently central fight in Congress and on the campaign trail.

Richards’ response has been to turn Planned Parenthood, and herself as its leader, into an ever bigger political player. She said security has been stepped up at Planned Parenthood clinics. She sees a direct connection between some of the Republican rhetoric in Congress and the shooting at a clinic over Thanksgiving weekend in 2015.

Richards campaigned hard against Trump, but she says the first six months have been “much worse” than she expected. His comments in support of Planned Parenthood during the campaign gave her hope that he’d have an open mind, she says. So did outreach from Ivanka Trump. “She seemed to be very sympathetic. I don’t know if she’s ever been a Planned Parenthood patient, but clearly, she knew women who had been and she knew the great care that we provided,” Richards says.

They had one meeting, before the president’s daughter became a senior adviser in the White House. Richards hasn’t been pleased with what’s happened since, and Trump hasn’t called her again, nor did she call Trump after the president kicked off his term by reinstituting the global “gag order” on funding for nonprofits that deal with abortion, or when the president backed Obamacare repeal bills that included stripping funding.

“I guess I could. I feel like talk is cheap, right? It’s actually what are the actions we’re seeing and what we’ve seen out of this administration from Day One have had both barrels aimed at women,” Richards says.

The solution in her mind is to have more women in Congress—and to “absolutely” have a woman on the Democratic ticket in 2020.

“I don’t know who, but I think there’s a number of qualified women, and it would help,” Richards says. “I know the difference it makes.”