Fighting Population With Women’s Rights : Meeting: Nafis Sadik has spent years promoting family planning. The head of this week’s U.N. conference sees equality as key to controlling world’s numbers.

When Nafis Sadik was growing up in India and Pakistan, among friends preoccupied with marriage, she wanted to change the world. Now she may get the chance.

Beginning Monday, she will preside over the International Conference on Population and Development, where she hopes the delegates of 170 nations will set a 20-year agenda for slowing the growth of world population.

First as an obstetrician-gynecologist, then as a pioneer in family planning, now as executive director of the U.N. Population Fund, Sadik has worked to elevate the status of women. She is convinced that equality for women is the key to population control.

She steps onto the world stage with a plan to give all women access to modern methods of birth control, and the right to choose whether and when to become pregnant.

Pope John Paul II and some Muslim leaders argue that the conference will promote abortion, birth control or promiscuity.

“I think we have to thank the Pope for all this publicity,” Sadik said in an interview in London. “It’s helpful.”

Abortion, she said, is “a very small part of the whole program of action, which has much more emphasis on . . . empowering individuals, particularly women.”

In her first speech for the conference, she charged Saturday that anti-abortion campaigns by the Vatican and Muslim fundamentalists have created controversy by misrepresenting the issue of abortion.

“Contrary to what others might want you to believe, the conference draft Program of Action does not advocate or promote abortion, let alone abortion on demand,” she said.

Sadik prefers to argue the facts, and emphasizes that nearly 90% of the action plan to be considered at the conference has been accepted by all the countries invited.

Born in Jaunpur, India, on Aug. 18, 1929, Sadik spent much of her childhood in Calcutta, where her father, Mohammed Shoaib, was a government finance officer. In school, she loved engineering, medicine and Indian classical music. She was a top-ranked badminton player, good at tennis and a tournament bridge player.

“I used to tell my mother sometimes I wished I could live two lives at once,” she said. “She used to say, ‘You’re mad. Nobody can live two lives.’

“At that time, I wanted to change everything. . . . I said, ‘I want to do something in which I’ll be known and I’ll contribute to society.’ ”

She chose medicine, but feared opposition from her father, who later became minister of finance in Pakistan and vice president of the World Bank. But instead of insisting she get married, he supported her and went along for her interview at Calcutta Medical College.

Her mother was more reluctant. Until her last year of medical school, Sadik said, her mother would say: “I don’t know why you’re doing all this medicine. You’re not going to work. Why don’t you get married, and I’ll give you lots of jewelry and clothes?”

She married Azhar Sadik, a Pakistani army officer, in Washington, D.C., after finishing medical school and an internship and residency at City Hospital in Baltimore. He encouraged her to work, and when they returned to Pakistan she became a civilian doctor in army hospitals.

Working with women in rural villages, part of the army’s community service program, sparked her interest in family planning.

When she would tell new mothers they shouldn’t get pregnant again for two years, the women would say their husbands or mothers-in-law had other ideas--especially if the baby was a girl.

“Then it started to come home to me that these poor women really had no control over their lives,” she said.

In Pakistan in the 1950s, there were no family planning services. Sadik decided to start a program and asked her commanding officer for money to buy contraceptives.

“He nearly fell off his chair,” she said, but finally gave her some money with a warning that if there were any complaints, “I’m going to say you’re doing it all on your own.”

Sadik bought condoms, took them to villages and talked to husbands about family planning.

“I think first they were a bit shocked, because I looked very young,” she said. “But I think they got convinced that I was quite firm, and I was very determined. I don’t think I got anyone who said, ‘No, I’m not going to listen.’ ”

When one woman became pregnant, Sadik was so angry with the husband that she made all the men sign pledges not to make their wives pregnant. She now says, with a laugh, that it was a “brash” and “stupid” thing to do.

After a three-month break in 1963 to try life without work, Sadik decided on a new career and went to Johns Hopkins University to study public health and health planning. By that time, she had three children of her own and two adopted daughters.

Back in Pakistan the next year, she helped design the country’s five-year family planning program and spent the next three years helping make it work.

She joined the U.N. Population Fund as an adviser in 1971 and was appointed executive director in 1987, becoming one of the first women to head a major U.N. organization.

She is in charge of the world’s largest source of assistance to population-control programs. In 1994, it will provide about $250 million to more than 140 countries and territories.

Javier Perez de Cuellar, then the United Nations’ secretary general, put her in charge of the U.N. International Conference on Population and Development in 1990. Since then, she has worked with member countries on the draft Program of Action.

Her contract ends in April, 1995, and she hopes Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the current secretary general, will renew it so she can help implement the program agreed upon in Cairo. “When I ultimately retire, I feel I still have a lot of things that I can do in Pakistan,” she said. “The rights for women and the empowerment of women is very poor there.”

* TIMES INTERVIEW: Sadik voices her views on population control. M3