Ivanka Trump quietly requested an in-person meeting with Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards after her father was inaugurated, according to a report.
President Trump and Planned Parenthood have publicly clashed over the organization’s abortion services. Last month, Vice President Mike Pence stepped in twice to save a Senate resolution aimed at killing an Obama administration rule that prevented states from blocking federal grants to abortion providers.
Richards, according to the organization’s executive vice president Dawn Laguens, explained to the president’s daughter that federal funding “doesn’t actually go to abortions.”
“The purpose of the meeting, from Cecile’s point of view, was to make sure that Ivanka fully understood what Planned Parenthood does, how it is funded, and why it would be a terrible idea for Planned Parenthood to be removed from being able to see Medicaid patients,” Laguens told Politico.
“We were clearing up misinformation about how this works.”
The outreach seems to have had little effect on softening tensions between the two parties as the organization, as Richards recently accused “anyone of working in this White House” of being responsible for policies putting women in the “crosshairs.”
In an interview earlier this week with CBS, Trump responded to her critics who have accused her of being complicit in her father’s decisions.
“If being complicit is wanting to, is wanting to be a force of good and to make a positive impact, then I’m complicit,” she said. “I don’t know that the critics who may say that of me, if they found themselves in this very unique and unprecedented situation that I am now in, would do any differently than I am doing.”
