Lawyer, activist and founder member of the international family planning movement, born Colombo, Ceylon, 18 September 1913; died Mumbai, India, 11 July 2005.

Mrs. Avabai B. Wadia, a guiding light and early pioneer of the sexual and reproductive health community and family planning movement, who has died in Mumbai aged 91, as fate would have it on World Population Day (11 July 2005), was one of those few brave women who accepted the colossal challenge of fighting for gender equality and reproductive rights not only in her native India but across the globe.

She was internationally famous by the age of 19 when she became the first woman from Ceylon to pass her Bar exams and qualify as a lawyer; the story was printed by the English press and to her surprise it quickly circulated the globe reaching her father in Ceylon before she herself had a chance to tell him.

She also began a lifelong passion for volunteering at an early age, involving herself in numerous women’s rights groups both in England and India in the 1920s, a commitment she maintained throughout the rest of her life.

It was involvement with these groups that brought her into contact with advocates for family planning, which would become her life’s work.

She was a driving force behind the formation of the Family Planning Association of India in 1949, and she led the FPAI to be one of the eight autonomous national family planning bodies to form the International Planned Parenthood Federation, based in London, in 1952.

In the 1980s she served two terms as President of the latter, while she was President of the FPAI for thirty-four years.

That she came to dedicate much of her life’s work to sexual and reproductive health and family planning was by no means guaranteed. In her autobiography, "The Light Is Ours", she describes how she was “revolted” by ideas of birth control she first encountered in London in the early 1930s; this was in no small part due to the racial overtones of some of this early thought.

Turning her attention to family planning issues in India nearly 20 years later she still had strong ethical and moral concerns, only to become firmly convinced of family planning’s role in improving the lives of women and establishing gender equality.

She saw it “as a means of helping women to get out of the trap of biological compulsion and of societal pressures for frequent childbearing which could ruin their health, cause neglect of their children, impoverish families and keep women tied to procreation.”

She also recognised that family planning could be successful only if it was voluntary and done through informed choice.

Born into a well respected Parsee family in colonial Ceylon in 1913, her father was a high-ranking official in a shipping company with a natural affinity with the ocean; while her mother was a strong and independent spirit with a passion for learning, becoming a founding member of the Colombo branch of the Theosophical Society.

These traits Avabai inherited, and perhaps it is no surprise that, through her mother’s family, she was related to Bhicaji Cama, one of the first Indian patriots to defy British rule and be forced into exile.

In 1928 aged fifteen she accompanied her mother to England, where they were reunited with Avabai’s brother Phirozeshah, then studying at Cambridge.

She attended the Brondesbury and Kilburn High School in London, where as the only Indian, and one dressed in a saree, she had a sense of her own uniqueness, which the casual racism of England in the 20s and 30s only underlined.

Having decided as a child that she wanted to be a lawyer she eschewed the idea of following her brother to Cambridge and upon matriculating from school began attending the Inns of Court; becoming, at the age of 19, the first woman from Ceylon to pass her Bar exams.

She was called to the Bar in 1934, and although she found work experience in a solicitors firm easily, getting a place in Chambers proved much more elusive. Not many would accept a woman, or ‘devils’ as they were known, into a legal firm and she faced rejection on many occasions – more than once on the grounds that there was no ladies lavatory.

Her mother’s connection with the Theosophical Society opened many doors socially, and Avabai became involved in a circle of British women’s organisations, developing a life-long passion for volunteering.

Involvement with the British Commonwealth League and the International Alliance of Women granted access to a cross-section of English society including many prominent social reformers.

With a background of agitation for Dominion status, later independence, for India, it also led to early meetings with Ghandi, Jinnah and Nehru, all in London for talks with the British Government.

Returning to India in 1939 she spent a month in Bombay before returning to Ceylon, where, once enrolled at the Supreme Court in Colombo, she started to practice law with a Parsee advocate, Nariman Choksy.

She also took up her voluntary work again with groups such as the Women’s Political Union and All India Women’s Conference.

She returned permanently to Bombay in 1941, almost immediately meeting her future husband, Dr. Bomanji K. Wadia – the first Indian to graduate from Harvard cum laude and then get a doctorate from Columbia University – marrying in 1946.

Her continued work with the All India Women’s Conference brought her into contact with family planning advocates, sparking a lifelong interest in reproductive health and rights and to her central role in establishing the FPAI in 1949.

Throwing herself whole-heartedly into this new area of work she became something of an unofficial historian of family planning from Ancient Egypt and Greece to the modern day, and she was instrumental in ensuring the inclusion of family planning in India’s first five year plan.

In early 1952 she returned to London to recuperate after a “disastrous” miscarriage which had jeopardised her life and had left her bereft.

However, six months later she was back in Bombay leading the effort to organise an international conference, later known as the Third International Conference on Planned Parenthood, which brought together the eight existing family planning associations and was attended by such luminaries of the family planning world as Margaret Sanger and Elise Ottesen-Jensen.

Something known only to a very few people, however, was that on the final day of the conference the delegates were to vote on forming an international federation; due to an oversight the official resolution to establish the federation hadn’t been drawn up.

Realising this, Avabai Wadia and three colleagues quickly wrote a resolution on a scrap of paper in the wings of the stage. It was unanimously passed and the delegates voted the International Planned Parenthood Federation into existence.

From 1952 onwards, she guided the work of IPPF, establishing world-wide regional offices, expanding its work to include many more countries, forming autonomous family planning associations under the umbrella of the federation and raising funds for its work.

It was under her two terms as President of the federation that it became the first Non-Governmental Organisation to be awarded the UN Population Award in 1985 and the $100,000 Third World Prize in 1987.

1985 was also the year when the Reagan administration, attempting to impose the religious dogma of its support base, reversed US funding policy and de-funded foreign organisations that provided abortion services or information abroad: known as the Mexico City Policy.

IPPF policy had always been, and remains, that the lives of thousands of women are lost unnecessarily through unsafe abortion; while the provision of safe abortion facilities saves lives.

Knowing that it would lose $17 million in US funding, IPPF stood firm and refused to change its policy. Visit our site: www.heldtoransom.org for more about the effects of this loss of funding.

Her steadfast leadership at this time helped IPPF to overcome this attack upon its work and gender equality, and although the Mexico City Policy has been reintroduced by the Bush administration, at the time of her death IPPF was working in even more countries, providing much needed sexual and reproductive health services to over 32 million women and men, many of them from amongst the poorest and most marginalised communities on earth.

Among many awards in her lifetime, she received the Padmashri in 1971 and Padmabhushan in 1981 for her services to family planning from the Government of India, and was recently conferred an honorary doctorate by the International Institute of Population Studies for her contribution to the field.

She also toured the United States under the State Department sponsored Foreign Leader Exchange Programme.

Having honed her skills early in London she became a brilliant, passionate and forceful speaker, deploying these skills to full effect at international conferences across the globe throughout the second half of the twentieth century.

She was also a prolific writer, and "The Light is Ours", her autobiography, is a detailed and fascinating personal account of one of the great social revolutions to follow the Second World War.

Despite being seriously ill and on dialysis, on a recent visit to Avabai Wadia, IPPF President, Dr. Nina Puri, reported, "Forty-five minutes in her presence brought back a rush of memories of this grand personality who has dedicated her entire life to voluntary service, devoting all her professional expertise, time and energy towards working in the sphere of women's upliftment since 1949. In the sphere of reproductive health and family planning she has walked tall on the Indian and world canvas, single-mindedly contributing her might and fight to our cause. Her deeds and actions have made a difference in empowering women the world over."

Avabai Wadia’s support for universal access to sexual and reproductive health rights and services as integral to equality and the alleviation of poverty never wavered.

To the end of her life she continued to campaign and advocate for human rights and greater understanding amongst peoples, perhaps best summed up by her own words to the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, where she said:

“We are standing at the threshold of the third millennium, when the world must no longer tolerate the division of people into the increasing billions living in dire poverty and want, and the affluent one billion. The ancient Sanskrit words have said it all in vasudhaiva kutumbakam - the world is one family. Humankind is one, and all humans have the aspiration and responsibility to work together without distinction of race, caste, creed, religion or gender.”

To purchase a copy of Avabai Wadia's book "The Light is Ours" please email info@ippf.org