Avaibai Wadia was a lawyer and activist whose work built and travelled paths between law and public health, feminist and anti-colonial struggles. A co-founder of International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPFF), she was an earlier pioneer in the field of reproductive health but equally in a feminist, anti-imperial, internationalism. She was born in 1913 in Colombo, Sri Lanka (then colonial Ceylon) into a peripatetic Zoroastrian family but she also created her own home, politically and otherwise, in women’s movements across the world and the paths they forged towards each other, and away from the world they had inherited. They sought to develop nothing less than a new international order, from the most intimate arenas of women’s lives to the most public and global arenas of international law and policy that determined possibilities for their future.
Vasuki Nesiah is Professor of Human Rights and International Law at the Gallatin School at NYU.