Grit and resolve were evident from early in her academic career. She recalled to Kagan the casual sexism of an era in which \u201cvery few women had both a family and a career, and I decided I really wanted the career\u201d.\u00a0But when, during her senior year at Pomona College in California, she approached one of her professors to request a recommendation for graduate school, he refused, telling her she would be taking a place from a young man. He told her: \u201cYou\u2019ll just get married and have children and waste your degree.\u201d<\/p>\n
Undeterred, she was accepted at Johns Hopkins where she took first a master\u2019s, and then a doctorate in international relations. Her new status, she recalled, \u201cmade all the difference in the world\u201d to the way she was perceived: \u201cold men had to call me Dr Camp\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n
![\"Jonathan](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/https:\/\/d1e00ek4ebabms.cloudfront.net\/production\/02a8dc9d-6723-4d1d-955f-eacaa72fc790.jpg\")
Guttmacher Institute co-president and CEO Jonathan Wittenberg with his predecessor Sharon Camp, who he said had a determination to get things done, \u2018obstacles be damned\u2019 \u00a9 Bethany Michaela\/Guttmacher Institute<\/p>\n
After completing her education, she entered the world of population policy and lobbying, and from 1975 to 1993 held a senior role at Population Action International, which works to advance sexual and reproductive health and rights.\u00a0But in 1997 she felt impelled to move from the more rarefied realm of policy to frontline action. Private doctors regularly prescribed contraceptive pills to wealthier women who wished to avoid pregnancy after unprotected, unplanned or unwanted sex, although it had never been approved for this purpose. But, except in some cases of rape, poorer women generally struggled to access the treatment.<\/p>\n
Alexander Sanger, a former president of Planned Parenthood of New York City (PPNYC) who knew Camp well, says she regarded it as an issue of basic health equity: \u201cSharon saw there was a divide between the healthcare that well-to-do women got versus what poorer women got.\u201d The remedy, Camp believed, was for a pill to be sanctified by the Food and Drug Administration as an emergency contraceptive. However, big pharmaceutical companies \u201cwouldn\u2019t touch it with a barge pole\u201d, she later recalled.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Her solution was to set up Women\u2019s Capital Corporation, financed entirely by non-profits, to develop and market it \u2014 an extraordinary undertaking for someone unversed in the commercial world. Following the success of Plan B, as the product was named, in 2004 the company was sold to Barr Pharmaceuticals and the pill has since been approved for over-the-counter sale in the US.<\/p>\n
The previous year she had become president and chief executive of the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy organisation whose personnel she proudly described as \u201cscholar-activists\u201d.\u00a0Wittenberg, current co-president and CEO, who worked alongside Camp until her retirement in 2013, remembers a woman \u201cwho really exuded gravitas\u201d and wielded huge influence in political and policy circles but was also a gentle and supportive mentor, determined to nurture the next generation in her field.<\/p>\n
She helped to build a business case for investment in sexual and reproductive health around the world, contributing to \u201ca big infusion of funding\u201d for family planning services, he said.\u00a0Domestically, she fought to secure the contraceptive coverage guarantee in the Affordable Care Act.\u00a0After the Supreme Court ruled in 2022 that there was no constitutional right to abortion, she saw some states roll back protections, a situation that she had hoped to see reversed in her lifetime.<\/p>\n
But entering her eighties, she described herself as \u201cvery content\u201d. Her only remaining goal? \u201cTo try and stay useful, because I think when we stop feeling useful, we go downhill.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":155071,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[103,397,396,61,60],"class_list":{"0":"post-155070","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-health-care","10":"tag-healthcare","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155070"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155070\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/155071"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}