The American social entrepreneur Phil Harvey, who has died aged 83, made contraception affordable for hundreds of millions of people in the developing world with subsidies provided by the profits from Adam & Eve, the sex shop company he founded in 1970. A committed libertarian, Harvey also used his considerable resources to champion the right to sexual healthcare and free speech in the US.
While working in the Punjab in India in the 1960s for the charity Care International, Harvey became deeply uncomfortable about the way western countries distributed aid. A woman in a threadbare sari knelt before him in gratitude for the food he was doling out, and he became determined to find a way to give aid that did not humiliate recipients.
He also began to think that the most urgent need for people in developing countries was better access to family planning, and that the distribution of contraception was inherently a marketing rather than a medical issue. He theorised that the most effective way to distribute condoms might be to use social marketing techniques. This meant bypassing doctors and clinics and subsidising their sale in ordinary shops or market stalls, promoted through local advertising campaigns.
Returning to the US in 1969, Harvey studied public health at the University of North Carolina, where he met a British doctor, Tim Black, who shared his zeal for family planning. Keen to test out Harvey’s social marketing ideas, they decided to see if they could persuade people in the US to buy condoms through the post, and ran eye-catching ads in 300 college magazines with slogans such as “What will you get her this Christmas – pregnant?”
It was a risky business as it was illegal at the time to send contraceptives (deemed an “obscene product”) through the US postal system. However, an avalanche of orders arrived and no prosecutions ensued. Emboldened, in 1971 Harvey founded Adam & Eve, the first mail-order contraceptive business in the US, which he soon expanded to include the sale of erotica and sex aids and which now has a chain of retail stores.
Business boomed, and using the proceeds from Adam & Eve, Harvey and Black founded Population Services International (PSI) a non-profit organisation that started a social marketing programme to sell condoms in Kenya. Adam & Eve customers had no idea they were subsidising cheap contraception abroad, and Harvey saw no reason to advertise the connection, arguing that altruism exists in a different part of the brain from wanting to have a good time on a Saturday night. When it came to starting up foreign programmes, he was also a hands-off manager, believing in hiring the best people locally, setting out his vision, and then allowing them to use their initiative to achieve the desired result.
Harvey stepped down as leader of PSI in 1977, believing it was wrong for the founder to stay at the helm indefinitely. By that time he was in any case involved with a second organisation: Marie Stopes, now MSI Reproductive Choices. The London family planning clinic had run into financial difficulties and in 1976 Harvey and Black rescued it, buying up its original clinic in Whitfield Street. Harvey became a long-term board member, helping it to grow from providing 150,000 women annually with contraception and safe abortions in the 70s to more than 12 million a year today.
Finally, in 1989 Harvey founded DKT International, named in honour of his friend Dharmendra Kumar Tyagi, an official in charge of India’s family planning programme. It operates in a similar way to PSI, has subsidised the sale of more than one billion cheap contraceptives in 90 countries, and is active in sex education and HIV prevention.
Harvey was born in Evanston, Illinois, to William, a farm tool supplier, and his wife, Lucy (nee Smith). The youngest of five siblings, taciturn, private and a deep thinker, he went to Harvard University in 1957 to study Slavic languages and literature. In 1963 he joined Care International to work in India, spending several years with the organisation before returning to the US and branching out with Black.
As head of Adam & Eve and a committed libertarian, Harvey soon became embroiled in legal battles to defend people’s access to sexual healthcare. In 1977 he challenged a law in New York state that prohibited the advertising and display of contraceptives. The case went to the supreme court and he won, arguing that advertising was protected by the first amendment and the right to free speech.
In 1986 Adam & Eve’s offices were raided by the police and Harvey was charged with disseminating obscenity. Ronald Reagan’s administration hoped to close down the adult entertainment industry and filed lawsuits against the company in many different states, trusting that the financial burden would make it buckle. But Harvey fought back, winning a lawsuit against the justice department in 1990 on the grounds that it had abused its power.
In 1987 he had also successfully challenged Reagan’s Mexico City policy, known as the “global gag”, which aimed to prevent any organisation that received a grant from the US Agency for International Development from performing, referring to, or even speaking about, safe abortion care.
To the end of his life Harvey supported organisations that fought to oppose government control of people’s private lives. He also founded the DKT Liberty Project, which campaigns on issues such as stopping the government from confiscating people’s assets, helping patients access medical marijuana, and safeguarding the right to free speech. He wrote about his work and philosophy in books that included Let Every Child Be Wanted (1999) and The Government vs Erotica (2001). He was also a novelist, writing, among other titles, the psychological thriller Show Time (2012).
In 1990 Harvey married the artist Harriet Lesser. She survives him, as do her two children from a previous relationship, and three grandchildren.
• Philip Dow Harvey, social entrepreneur, born 25 April 1938; died 2 December 2021
