Avabai Bomanji Wadia, who lived from September 18, 1913, to July 11, 2005, was a Ceylonese-born barrister, social worker and writer who became the first Sri Lankan woman to pass the bar examinations, doing so with honors in 1934. Born into an affluent Parsi family in Colombo, she moved to England at fifteen to finish her schooling, practiced law in London, and returned to Colombo in 1939 before her family relocated to India in 1941, where she settled in Mumbai. There she turned to social activism focused on contraception and family planning, founding the Family Planning Association of India in 1949 and serving as its president for 34 years, work that helped bring family planning into India's first five-year plan. In 1952 she organized the Third International Conference on Planned Parenthood, leading to the founding of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, which she later served as president of from 1983 to 1989 and remained patron of until her death. The Government of India awarded her the Padma Shri in 1971.
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