Avabai Wadia // India’s family planning pioneer
Channel: The Updated Youth
Date: 2022-11-04

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Before India pioneered nationwide family planning in 1952, concepts like ‘birth control’ and ‘agency of women’ seemed foreign at best, given that forced maternity and undesired parenthood were not considered topics that needed urgent addressing. Outside the confines of the Indian subcontinent, leaders like Margaret Sanger had already begun pushing for the establishment of planned parenthood organisations that would let women have access to birth control. Closer home, the movement began brewing around the 40s when activists, including a lawyer by the name of Avabai Wadia, decided to take up the cause. Today, Wadia’s name is synonymous, alongside Lady Dhanvanti Rama Rau, with family planning and birth control in India. But getting here would be a long and arduous journey. Avabai Wadia, 19, became the first woman from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to pass the bar exam in the United Kingdom. Her success encouraged the Ceylonese government to allow women to study law in the country. This was not the only time Wadia spurred government policies on women's rights. By the time she died in 2005, she had become a globally respected figure in the family planning movement, combining a lawyer's acumen with a dedication to socially uplifting women. Wadia was born in 1913 in a progressive Parsi family in Colombo. After qualifying as a lawyer, she worked in both London and Colombo despite omnipresent "masculine prejudice".
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