Martha M. Campbell

1941-2022

Dr. Martha Madison Campbell of Berkeley, California died February 3 with family by her side. Martha was born in Ridgewood, New Jersey, as the fourth daughter of Margaret Macon Campbell and Kenneth Campbell, an aeronautical engineer. She graduated from Wellesley College in 1963 with a degree in art history. She earned her Master’s degree and PhD in public policy from the University of Colorado in 1994.

Throughout her academic studies and her career, Martha’s focus was on women’s autonomy, family planning and safe abortion. In the 1990s, she directed the population program, including reproductive rights, for the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. In 2000, she founded Venture Strategies for Health and Development, a not-for-profit focused on securing women’s freedom to choose their family size. In 2006 she coauthored the first comprehensive review of the broad range of barriers in many countries that limit women’s reproductive options. In 2012 she coauthored “The Impact of Freedom on Fertility Decline”, a paradigm explaining the slowing of population growth in a human rights framework. She served on the boards of World Health

Partners in New Delhi, the Margaret Pyke Trust in London, and the African Institute for Development Policy. She demonstrated a unique ability to identify and support professionals in poor countries. One outstanding success was raising $10,000,000 to make the medicine misoprostol widely available in many African and Asian countries. Misoprostol prevents and treats postpartum hemorrhage at home births.

Students were inspired by Martha’s energy and her unwavering focus on scaling up family planning, safe motherhood and girl’s education. She traveled all over the world, accumulating two million flight miles. The not-for-profit she founded, now called OASIS, has had stunning success keeping thousands of Nigerian girls in secondary school.

Martha married Mort Iler in 1964. They had three children and three grandchildren. In 1997, Martha married Dr. Malcolm Potts and joined him on the UC Berkeley faculty. She treasured adding his children and grandchildren to her family. She was proud of her grandfather, William Wallace Campbell, a famous astronomer who was President of the University of California before he was appointed President of the National Academy of Sciences. The family treasures a personal telegram from Albert Einstein, thanking Campbell for proving his theory of relativity correct.

Martha is survived by two sisters, her husband, and their combined six children and six grandchildren.