gloria feldt
Gloria Feldt capped her 30-year career with Planned Parenthood—"an extraordinary opportunity to make my life's passion my life's work"—by serving Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) as its national president and CEO from 1996-2005. Now, she has embarked upon a new adventure: writing, speaking, and media commentary about her passions in her own voice.
Gloria is the author of two books. The War on Choice: The Right-Wing Attack on Women's Rights and How to Fight Back (Bantam) documents the attempts to eliminate freedoms women have taken for granted for decades and outlines a plan of action to reverse this dangerous course. Behind Every Choice Is a Story tells the personal stories of women's varied choices about sex, relationships and childbearing. It was recommended for secondary school libraries by the American Library Association's Amelia Bloomer Project. Buy Yourself Roses: Thoughts on My Life, Love, and Leading Roles, a collaboration with Kathleen Turner and her memoir, was published in February of 2007.
A confluence of the personal and the political propelled Gloria's own story. A teen mother and wife from small-town Texas, she raised three children while attending college. She taught Head Start and was active in the civil rights movement. Realizing that women's civil rights depend on having the right to determine their own reproductive destinies, Gloria joined Planned Parenthood in 1974. Her visionary thinking, effective activism, and courageous leadership led to her being tapped as the national president of the nation's largest provider of reproductive healthcare and education.
Her call to "fight forward" has been the driving force behind state and Federal contraceptive equity legislation. She led the fight for accessible emergency contraception (EC), medically accurate sex education, and safe, legal abortion. Her leadership helped bring over a million people to Washington D. C. to March for Women's Lives - the largest march of any kind in the nation's history. The Prevention First Act of 2005 owes its inception to Gloria's determination to make sure women get the healthcare they need. She expanded PPFA's international programs and served on the U.S. delegation to the U.N.'s Cairo plus Five evaluation meeting in The Hague in 1999.
Gloria is a sought-after public speaker, lecturing at universities, civic and professional organizations, churches and synagogues, and national and international conferences, to audiences as large as 1,000,000 and as diverse as the Aspen Institute, the National Asian Women's Health Organization, the 92nd Street Y, the National Press Club, and the Democratic National Convention. Her commentary has appeared in The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, among other publications, as well as on-line publications such as TomPaine.org and various blogs and chats. Gloria, a newsmaker as well as a commentator, has appeared on top-ranked public affairs programs, including NPR's "Morning Edition" and "Fresh Air", the Today show, Good Morning America, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
She and her husband, Alex Barbanell, have a combined family of six children, nine grandchildren, and one great-grandchild. They live in New York and Arizona.
For more speakers on abortion, see: Amy Richards, Jennifer Baumgardner, Loretta Ross, Katha Pollitt, Gloria Steinem, Wyndi Anderson, Third Wave Foundation
