Dr. Sharon Camp
Dr. Sharon Camp (1943-2025) was a public policy expert and pioneering advocate for women’s reproductive health, widely known as the mother of Plan B, the emergency contraceptive pill. Following years of policy work, Dr. Camp became determined to get contraception directly into the hands of women and to make abortion safer. When every major American pharmaceutical company declined to bring emergency contraception to market out of fear of political backlash, she took an unprecedented step, founding her own pharmaceutical company and declaring, “Damn it, if they won’t do it, we’ll do it ourselves.”
In the late 1980s, Dr. Camp helped found the Reproductive Health Technologies Project, which worked to bring mifepristone, often referred to as the abortion pill, to the United States. She later turned her attention to emergency contraception and founded the Women’s Capital Corporation, one of the world’s smallest pharmaceutical companies, for the sole purpose of bringing emergency contraception to market. After being turned down by more than 150 venture capital firms, she secured funding through grants and loans from nonprofit organizations. Through the Women’s Capital Corporation, she led the development and commercialization of levonorgestrel-based emergency contraception (Plan B) in the United States and Canada. Her work continued through FDA approval, product packaging, marketing, and distribution, making emergency contraception accessible for the first time to millions of women worldwide. The U.S. market for emergency contraception is projected to exceed $550 million annually by 2030.
In 2003, Dr. Camp sold Women’s Capital Corporation to Barr Pharmaceuticals. Half of the proceeds were returned to the nonprofit organizations that had financed the product’s development, and the remaining funds were placed in a charitable trust. She also played a key role in the International Consortium for Emergency Contraception, helping to make emergency contraception a standard component of women’s health care globally.
Dr. Camp’s leadership in reproductive health and rights spanned decades. She served as President and CEO of the Guttmacher Institute from 2003 until her retirement in 2013. Under her guidance, Guttmacher launched research initiatives in dozens of countries and built lasting partnerships with local institutions, significantly strengthening the global evidence base for reproductive health policy. Dr. Camp was also a leading figure in international family planning policy. She served as Senior Vice President of Population Action International for nearly two decades. She also played a central role in drafting the Programme of Action adopted at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, a landmark agreement that reshaped international norms around reproductive rights, gender equality, and family planning. She later served as founding chair of the Reproductive Health Technologies Project and held board positions with Family Health International, the International Center for Research on Women, the Global Health Council, and Planned Parenthood of Maryland.
A prolific scholar, Dr. Camp authored more than 70 publications on family planning, emergency contraception, and reproductive health policy. She held a PhD in International Affairs from Johns Hopkins University.