The Doctor Is In

At age 16, Leana Wen sought birth-control information at a Planned Parenthood health center. Now, 20 years later, she returns to that same clinic— this time as president.

- Kayla Webley Adler

Like many teenagers, when Leana Wen was 16, she was curious about birth control but wasn’t exactly getting top-notch sex education at home. “It’s not something my parents ever talked to me about,” Wen says. “I think the closest my mother came was when she told me, ‘You need to finish school.’” She intended to graduate but had no idea what getting her diploma had to do with sex; she needed real information.

Wen, now 36, remembers feeling terrified when she walked into a clinic run by Planned Parenthood in Pasadena, California, near where her family was living at the time. “If you were to ask me the color of the wallpaper or number of chairs, I would have no way of knowing that,” she says, “but I remember the emotion of sitting in that waiting room, feeling so scared and anxious.” Wen found some pamphlets on contraceptives and was just about to take them and run when her name was called by the receptionist. She doesn’t recall the specifics of that first appointment, but she left knowing she had found her people. “The nurse was so kind and normal and talked to me in the way I needed, as a peer, without judgment,” Wen says. “I remember the relief that I felt after I talked to somebody who I thought really got me.”

Twenty years later, on a sunny morning in late January, a banner reading “Welcome home, Dr. Wen” greets her as she walks into that same health center in Pasadena as the newly named president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA). Wen is the first doctor to lead PPFA in nearly 50 years, and today’s visit is the third stop on her listening tour to 20 of the organization’s 53 regional affiliate offices that run Planned Parenthood’s more than 650 health centers, which provide care for some 2.5 million people nationwide.