By Penelope Green, The New York Times
Sharon Camp, a public policy expert and advocate for women’s reproductive health who was known as the mother of Plan B, the emergency contraceptive pill, and who founded what was surely one of the world’s smallest pharmaceutical companies to bring it to market, died on Oct. 25 in La Plata, Md. She was 81.
Talcott Camp, a cousin, confirmed the death, in a rehabilitation facility, but did not specify a cause.
For nearly a half-century, doctors have known that women can prevent pregnancy within 72 hours of unprotected sex by taking a high dose of oral contraceptives. Initially, this remedy was not widely promoted; instead, it was used mostly in rape crisis centers in the United States and later in international refugee communities to help women who had been raped as an act of war, notably victims of sexual assault in the former Yugoslavia.
Dr. Camp, who had a Ph.D. in international relations, was a family planning veteran. But for years she was only vaguely aware of emergency contraception, or the morning-after pill, as it is widely known.
A seasoned Capitol Hill lobbyist, she had come up during the 1970s, when family planning was a bipartisan issue. Even opponents of abortion were supportive, because effective contraception meant fewer abortions.
As vice president of the Population Crisis Committee (now Population Action International), a nonprofit focused on reproductive health care, particularly in developing nations, she had traveled throughout in Africa and had seen the consequences of poor reproductive care and lack of information in communities there. And like many women of her generation, she had firsthand experience: When she was 23, she had nearly died after having an illegal abortion in Mexico.
Following years of policy work, Dr. Camp was determined to get contraception directly into the hands of women and to make abortions safer. In the late 1980s, she and others founded the Reproductive Health Technologies Project, which worked to bring mifepristone, the so-called abortion pill, to the United States.
Then, Dr. Camp turned her attention to emergency contraception.
…Continued
SOURCE: The New York Times, 14 November 2025; PHOTO: Marty Katz for The New York Times;