Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards Is Not Overpaid. Here’s Why.

There’s one more thing I want to touch on from last week’s Planned Parenthood hearings, and from Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards’ testimony:

In a long congressional hearing on Tuesday, Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood, fielded questions about her pay.

Jason Chaffetz, a Republican representative from Utah, said, “Planned Parenthood is an organization with massive salaries.” It was part of his broader critique of the organization, whose clinics primarily offer reproductive health services for women, a small percentage of which are abortions. “Ms. Richards makes nearly $600,000 a year,” he said.

Abortion opponents on twitter and elsewhere jumped on these numbers to argue that Richards makes an outrageous salary and that this somehow proves that Planned Parenthood really is all about profiting off of abortion. Of course, reporters began crunching the numbers as well, and what they found was that Richards’ salary is not only within the realm of normal but even on the low side.

According to New York Times’ The Upshot:

Planned Parenthood brought in about $1.3 billion in revenue last year, according to its annual report, making it larger than the vast majority of nonprofit organizations in the United States. Among nonprofit hospitals, only about 200 had higher revenue. Chief executives at hospitals of that size typically earn between $1.2 million and $1.5 million, said Dr. Ashish Jha, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, who has studied hospital executive pay.

. . .

For those who might question whether health care companies are the right comparison, we also compared Ms. Richards’s pay to compensation for executives across the entire nonprofit sector. As Mr. Chaffetz pointed out in the hearing, Planned Parenthood does engage in activities, including various types of political advocacy, that a traditional hospital does not. In GuideStar’s report on nonprofit pay, among the 3,335 organizations in its highest budget category — nonprofits bringing in more than $50 million — average compensation is $689,973, about 17 percent more than Ms. Richards earns in total compensation.

U.S. News & World Report also crunched the numbers. Suffice it to say that Richards’ salary is normal for the size and focus of a nonprofit like Planned Parenthood. Any and all brouhaha over her salary is a trumped up non-controversy. But while I’m at it, let me go ahead and add two more points to this conversation.

First, the executive director of a nonprofit that faces the sort of violent threats Planned Parenthood does ought to be paid well as a form of “combat pay.” Combat pay is the additional salary military personnel receive when they are on active duty in a combat zone. It is an acknowledgement that military personnel are putting more on the line when they are in physical danger than when they are stationed on the home front.

When asked in 2014 whether she receives death threats, Richards dodged the question. “I try not to read everything that comes in over the transom,” she said, before steering the conversation toward the dangers faced by abortion doctors, clinic workers, and even patients. “I take very seriously the safety of our doctors and our clinicians and our patients. And that’s foremost in my mind all the time.” Richards also spoke of the strong impression the 2009 murder of abortion doctor George Tiller made on her.

Abortion has long been a dangerous industry in which to work. In the 1990s, numerous abortion doctors and clinic workers were gunned down. While murders have been more rare in the last fifteen years, Planned Parenthood clinics still face arson and bomb attacks. I saw this first hand when my local clinic was vandalized, inflicting significant damage. According to the Huffington Post, death threats against abortion providers have spiked since this summer.

Last month, Amelia Bonow wrote about her own abortion and started the hashtag #ShoutYourAbortion, designed to reduce the stigma attached to abortion. She was forced to go into hiding after receiving death threats. In the 2014 video cited above, Cecile Richards was not willing to speak about death threats made against her personally, preferring to discuss those made against providers, clinic workers, and patients, but given her position, there is no way she doesn’t receive threats.

When we compare Richards’ salary to the salaries of nonprofit hospital executives or the salaries executives receive at other large nonprofits, these comparisons don’t factor in the increased risk involved in heading up a nonprofit like Planned Parenthood. Even outside of personal death threats, the death threats against abortion providers and the arson attacks faced by individual clinics are going to take a psychological tole on whomever the Planned Parenthood board hires as the organization’s executive director—a psychological tole not typically faced by executives at other nonprofits.

Second, I want to head off any argument that nonprofit executive salaries should be lower because these organizations are, well, nonprofits. After all, the idea goes, is it right for someone to profit from a nonprofit? The problem with this argument is that if nonprofit executive salaries are too low in comparison to for-profit executive salaries, the nonprofit sector will not be able to retain competent and effective executive directors, because they’ll lose them to the for-profit sector.

I want to be clear that I am absolutely not saying that nonprofit executives should bring in hefty salaries while driving their nonprofits into the ground, or that executive director salaries should be outside of the normal range for the size of a given nonprofit. What I am saying is that there are good reasons for paying the executive directors of large nonprofits like Planned Parenthood six-figure salaries, reasons that do not conflict with the spirit of being nonprofit.

Have a look at this excellent TED talk for more on this subject:

Next time you hear someone claim that Cecile Richards is overpaid, or that the executive director of a large nonprofit like Planned Parenthood shouldn’t make a six-figure salary because it’s still a nonprofit, let them know that Richards’ salary is on the level with those of executive directors of other nonprofits of similar size and focus, point out that as the executive director of Planned Parenthood Richards has to deal with things like death threats, and explain why paying the executive directors of large nonprofits six-figure salaries is actually good for those nonprofits and for charity.