Former congressional candidate to lead Utah’s Planned Parenthood as health care group goes on offense

Eighteen minutes into a half-hour local public radio show meant to spur conversation between people from opposing sides of the political aisle, Shireen Ghorbani, the voice representing “the left” on the show, said to the other guest, “I feel like we’re just trying to dodge talking about what you’re doing to women’s bodies.”

It was March 2020, and Sen. Daniel McCay was in the midst of pushing through his abortion trigger ban during the final days of Utah’s annual legislative session. “No, I am happy to talk about that,” McCay responded.

“The idea that it could be banned, and that we might be a society that’s ready to move forward without abortions — I’m in,” the Riverton Republican said.

Following the senator’s description of the bill, Ghorbani — then a Democrat on the Salt Lake County Council and former congressional candidate with a platform focused on health care access — told about her experiences as a sexual assault survivor and a mother who’d had a miscarriage. She explained how she sees an abortion ban affecting people in those situations, adding, “This is one that just feels so deeply important and deeply personal to me.”

McCay’s trigger ban passed on the final day of the session and then-Gov. Gary Herbert signed the bill into law that same month. Two years later, the near-total ban took effect after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade — the precedent that protected abortion as a constitutional right. Planned Parenthood Association of Utah immediately sued and the law was put on hold. Abortion remains legal up to 18 weeks in the state while the case continues.

With McCay’s ban hanging over the state, Ghorbani is taking charge of Utah’s Planned Parenthood affiliate, the organization announced Wednesday. And she’s bringing with her those life experiences, and that ardor, to take the health care organization on the offensive at a time when Republican politicians are looking to impose more reproductive care restrictions and target Planned Parenthood, specifically.

‘Undaunted and unrelenting’

Just over a year ago, within hours of the Utah Supreme Court ruling that the state’s trigger ban would remain blocked as the case was sent back to a lower court, Ghorbani stood atop Planned Parenthood Association of Utah’s Metro Health Center near downtown Salt Lake City and unfurled a hot pink banner that said, “Abortion is Legal in Utah.”

The idea for the bold display was Ghorbani’s, who was then the chief corporate affairs officer for the organization.

She steps into the role of president and CEO of the Utah affiliate, which served over 35,000 patients last year, according to a spokesperson, as Planned Parenthood faces unprecedented challenges.

Earlier this year, President Donald Trump’s administration moved to freeze some of the Title X funds meant to pay for reproductive health services — that money never went toward abortions — for low-income Americans. The majority of grant recipients who had their funds withheld were Planned Parenthood affiliates.

Because Planned Parenthood Association of Utah was the state’s sole Title X entity, the Beehive State is one of seven that have lost the entirety of their federal funds. Utah’s Planned Parenthood was forced to raise some of its fees and closed two of its eight clinics — the pair were the furthest from Salt Lake City, and the most accessible to the state’s most rural residents.

Congress also recently passed a measure meant to defund Planned Parenthood by barring patients from using Medicaid at many of its clinics. As interim CEO, Ghorbani decided that Planned Parenthood Association of Utah would join the national organization as one of three plaintiffs in a lawsuit challenging the policy, which has so far limited the law’s impact.

Locally, the Legislature has made moves as recently as this year’s session to incapacitate the group, pulling a legislative guidebook from distribution because lawmakers disliked a Planned Parenthood ad it contained, and barring it from teaching sex education in schools.

“When we talk about Planned Parenthood playing offense,” Ghorbani said in an interview, “what we are talking about is doing everything that we can to make sure that our patients have the greatest amount of access to the full spectrum of sexual and reproductive health care that they need.”

Sitting with a reporter at Planned Parenthood’s West Valley Health Center, Ghorbani pointed to posts on social media by Utah politicians, like McCay, celebrating clinic closures, saying it’s important that reproductive rights supporters don’t shy away from conversations about the effects of these policies.

“It’s a non-negotiable for me, making sure that people understand what is lost when health centers close, making sure that people understand the horror stories that we’re seeing coming out of states where there [are] bans that are similar to the one that we have on our books, that we’ve continued to fight out in the courts,” Ghorbani said. “People have to understand what happens when politicians use people’s health care for political gain.”

Someone who believed in – and was capable of delivering — that message, bridging the divides between doctors, patients and their lawmakers, is what Planned Parenthood Association of Utah’s board was looking for when determining its new leader, said board Chair Camille Cook.

“We really sought a leader who listens to patients and who understands those trigger laws and legislative hostility toward reproductive rights, especially because they don’t necessarily reflect the lived experiences of many Utahns,” said Cook, a public health expert who has both volunteered with and worked at Planned Parenthood, and eventually joined the Utah affiliate’s board in 2020.

“She calls out the harm of a lot of the policies that are implemented, … and the approach that she takes rejects the fear and shame in favor of, I would argue, compassion, agency and trust in the organization,” Cook added of Ghorbani.

In the coming months, Ghorbani will have to spearhead the opposition to new efforts to curtail access to reproductive care.

Lawmakers are already discussing plans to pass laws that would impact Planned Parenthood’s services when they convene in January for the 2026 legislative session. Rep. Karianne Lisonbee, R-Clearfield, who sought to ban abortion clinics in the state, then worked to repeal her law after it slowed down the trigger ban case, told the Deseret News that she has opened a bill file to stop Medicaid funds the state receives from going to Planned Parenthood.

And the next hearing in the trigger ban case is scheduled to take place in April of next year.

“For Planned Parenthood, our work has never been clearer,” Planned Parenthood Federation of America President Alexis McGill Johnson said in a statement to The Tribune. “We are fighting in a climate that is increasingly hostile to our existence, and for Planned Parenthood patients’ rights to simply be seen.”

She continued, “We are grateful for leaders like Shireen, who continue to step up at this moment — when care is under attack and people are losing the freedom to make their own decisions about their bodies, lives, and futures — undaunted and unrelenting.”

Talking about life

In 2023, as the nation approached the one-year mark since the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that eliminated the constitutional right to an abortion, Ghorbani stood on a stage in downtown Salt Lake City and detailed the complications of her first and second pregnancies.

Her stint in politics had come to an end, and Ghorbani was working as the community health director at Intermountain Health — the largest hospital network in Utah, which stretches into neighboring states throughout the West.

At the end of her first pregnancy, the one that made her a mother, Ghorbani told the crowd she had preeclampsia, a complication that can result in death for both the mother and baby. While both survived, her second pregnancy ended differently.

“It was clear that something was not right,” Ghorbani said in an interview retelling the story of her second pregnancy. At the time, miscarriage was rarely spoken about publicly. So Ghorbani was surprised by how unprepared she was to deal with it: she didn’t know how much blood there was going to be, and no one told her that she should take time off from work.

“I’m just so grateful again that I had, one phone call away, access to expert care that was able to kind of guide me through the process and suggest, maybe you should head home,” Ghorbani said.

Two of the most common options for treating a miscarriage include either taking mifepristone, then misoprostol, causing contractions for the fetal tissue to pass, or a surgical procedure called dilation and curettage, or D&C — the same medications and procedure used for an abortion. Abortion bans like the one that could take effect in Utah, Ghorbani pointed out, can make miscarriage more difficult and dangerous.

Ghorbani said she shared that sentiment not just in front of the Salt Lake City audience, but in a phone call with McCay after the March 2020 public radio show, and she plans to use her position to continue talking about the real-life consequences she anticipates would come if the ban takes effect.

“She will have a conversation with anyone you know, and a real conversation and share her views and listen to their views. And that kind of listening and real exchange is, I think, absolutely what makes a really strong leader,” said Stephanie Dolmat, who managed Ghorbani’s 2018 congressional campaign.

Ghorbani’s campaign, with the help of volunteers, knocked on nearly 100,000 doors from the southernmost point of Utah’s 2nd Congressional District on the Arizona border to the northernmost in Davis County, according to Dolmat. That work in crimson Utah inevitably included getting to know people “with very different views than she might have had,” Dolmat added. “I think she always was looking to see where values might overlap.”

And as the politician-turned-health care leader takes her next step, Ghorbani said, she plans to do the same thing. “I cannot think of anything that I would rather do more … than work to try to protect people’s freedoms when it comes to planning their lives and getting the care that they need.”