She was an obstetrician-gynecologist who became the first woman to direct a United Nations agency, the U.N. Population Fund. She was widely regarded as one of the most effective advocates of women's reproductive rights around the world.
She graduated from Dow Medical College in Karachi, and studied public health at Johns Hopkins University.
She grew up in Calcutta (now Kolkata) and Karachi, where her father was a government finance officer after the partition in 1947. He later became Pakistan's finance minister and a vice president of the World Bank.