Peter Yang/August

Interviewed by Mark Warren, November 30, 2015, New York City.

The same woman who is picketing your clinic one day finds out that she needs Planned Parenthood the very next day.

We have moved into an era in the media in which no one waits for anything to be verified.

I'll let the congressmen speak for themselves. If I really thought they cared about women's health, I'd care more about what they say.

There are members of Congress who think that women are just not in their place anymore. Things were going pretty well for them the past several hundred years—it all started when we chose to be able to decide when and whether to have children.

Even people who have mixed feelings about abortion hate it when women are harassed going into a health clinic. Or doctors.

All it takes is one person who is unhinged.

Yes, the shootings were just three days ago. I hope that anyone who uses that kind of heated rhetoric is looking hard in the mirror this morning and thinking about the implications of their words and actions. But what I've seen over the past few months, even prior to this tragedy, has been an unbelievable outpouring, particularly from young men and women, who probably were just going about their day and either saw the five-hour hearing on Capitol Hill or read some of the really crazed rhetoric of some of the candidates for president and realized, "Okay, this is something I actually now have to take a position on and be involved in." I can't get on the subway now without a young man stopping me and saying, "I stand with Planned Parenthood."

To have someone lie about you repeatedly on national television, it can benefit them in the short term. But the short term doesn't last very long.

It's been very tough for Republicans I know who support Planned Parenthood but who now consistently vote against us because they don't want to be targeted by the far right of their party. They have told me this.

The videos were more of what I'd call a long con. For years, we've had people pretending to be patients and undercover videotaping our staff, but this was a three-year effort—setting up a fake company, attending medical conferences, infiltrating the medical establishment. They weren't interested in actually uncovering wrongdoing; they were interested in creating wrongdoing.

"The videos were more of what I'd call a long con."

This is nothing new. Ninety-nine years ago, when Margaret Sanger and her sister opened the first health center—it wasn't a health center, really, they just provided pamphlets on how to prevent unintended pregnancy—ten days later, an undercover cop posing as a mother busted them and sent Margaret to jail, where, of course, she taught all her fellow inmates about birth control.

My mom [former Texas governor Ann Richards] figured out midway through her life that this was it. You had one chance to make a difference. The answer is always yes, whatever it is. She's a woman who lived through many mistakes, she would say, if she were here today. But she just kept moving and was never one to look back. And boy, that has been enormously important to me.

Growing up, we just thought "son of a bitch" was, like, an adjective you used for most people.

My dad was out on the front lines defending conscientious objectors to the Vietnam War. He was fighting for the rights of farmworkers, doing things that were completely unpopular. Standing on the side of things you believe in, particularly when they're unpopular, is incredibly empowering.

I became an activist in college, and I thought when we left college, we were all supposed to just keep doing what we were doing. And then I found that all my classmates, for the most part, were going to law school, or going to business school, or becoming shrinks like their parents, and I was like, "Wait! I thought we were supposed to be making social change!"

I became a labor organizer on the border, organizing garment workers. I went to Guatemala, learned Spanish, moved back to Texas, and tried to get into the labor movement, which was hard for someone who didn't come up through the ranks. The women I organized are the same women who count on Planned Parenthood.

I remember living in Los Angeles, working with Central Americans who had come across the border to clean office buildings in downtown Los Angeles. Justice for Janitors. We began to organize and I said, "Look, you know, you could lose your job." And they said, "I could have lost everything just crossing the border to come up here, so I'm ready for whatever."

People have such extraordinary courage. It's the people who have the very least who have the most courage and the most generosity toward others.

The women who come to Planned Parenthood are not coming to make a political statement. They come because they need affordable health care, or maybe they found a lump in their breast and have nowhere else to go, or they badly need birth control and can't afford it.

I went to Westlake High. I was called to the principal's office for wearing a black arm band. Principal Tom Hestand, wherever he may be, called me to the principal's office, wanting to know why I was wearing a black arm band, and I explained to him about the Moratorium and the Vietnam War. And he called my mom. His lucky day was that she wasn't at home when he called.

We grew up listening to Odetta, Leadbelly, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Wayne Oakes, Willie Nelson. We camped all over Central Texas; we hung out around the campfire and sang music. My dad would think nothing of … we just put the canoe on top of the car and off we went. I mean, that was where Texas liberals hung out. Molly Ivins was always there, and that was really our growing up.

It was a pretty wonderful childhood.

This article was originally published in the February 2016 issue.

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