Avabai Wadia

Wadia was born in Colombo, in what was then British Ceylon, into a Parsi family. Her father, Dorabji Muncherji, was a shipping officer.

She was sent to England in 1928 at the age of fifteen and attended Brondesbury and Kilburn High School in London. She joined the Inns of Court in 1932 and in 1934 became the first woman from Ceylon to pass the bar examinations, doing so with honours. She practised at the High Court of Justice in London between 1936 and 1937 before returning to Colombo in 1939.

Her family moved to Bombay in 1941, where she joined the All India Women's Conference and became involved in campaigning on women's health and reproductive rights. In 1946 she married Bomanji Khurshedji Wadia.

In 1949 she was among the founders of the Family Planning Association of India, alongside Dhanvanthi Rama Rau. She served as its general secretary from 1953 to 1963 and then as its president for more than three decades.

In 1952 she organised the Third International Conference on Planned Parenthood in Bombay, attended by Margaret Sanger and Elise Ottesen-Jensen among others; the conference led directly to the creation of the International Planned Parenthood Federation. Wadia was president of the IPPF from 1983 to 1989, a period during which the federation received the United Nations Population Award in 1985.

She wrote extensively on population and reproductive health and published a memoir, The Light is Ours, in 2001. She left resources to the Research Centre for Women's Studies at the SNDT Women's University, which maintains the Dr Avabai and Dr Bomanji Khurshedji Wadia Archive for Women.

The Government of India conferred the Padma Shri on her in 1971.[2][3][4][5]