My father, Peter Lawton, who has died aged 72, made a huge contribution to women’s reproductive health around the world with his pioneering approach to the grassroots development of public health clinics. He carried out his work in developing countries, mainly working for Marie Stopes International (MSI).
As country director for MSI in India from 1979 until 1982, he established a network of low-cost reproductive health clinics for women that offered, among other things, confidential abortion services for the first time in the country.
He then headed up MSI globally, helping to establish more reproductive health clinics in 27 other countries, making it a priority to allow local women to run the programmes themselves once they had been set up with outside financial and technical help.
Born in London, Peter was the only child of Doris Drewett, who worked in the Wren secretarial corps, and her husband, Samuel Lawton, a submariner in the Royal Navy. When Peter was six the family emigrated from Surrey to New Zealand so that his father could take up a post with the Royal New Zealand Navy.
After attending Westlake boys high school in Auckland, Peter worked in advertising as a trainee, then at Shell Oil, where he was in the finance department looking after motor racing accounts. From there he went on to work in publicity for a film distribution company and an airline.
Eventually, in 1968, he decided to look for new horizons in the UK, first working in advertising, and in 1971 joining Air India as a publicity officer, developing tourism programmes aimed at promoting India to UK visitors – a job that allowed him to develop and pursue a fascination with India.
In 1979 he was recruited by Tim Black, founder of MSI, to join the organisation as a country director in India, where the first clinics he set up were in slum areas of Delhi and Agra. After a number of years as head of global operations he went freelance so that he could do similar work with the UN and other humanitarian agencies while continuing his connection with MSI.
He continued to be greatly valued by MSI as an intrepid traveller who always showed great fortitude in challenging environments, making him the “go-to” man when there was a problem no one else could manage. Even close to his retirement, in 2015, he was called upon by MSI to go to South Sudan to evacuate staff in the midst of civil conflict.
Outside his work on reproductive health, Peter was founder in 1989 of Global Tiger Patrol, a charity that has raised awareness of the rapid decline of the global tiger population due to poaching for traditional Chinese medicines.
In recent years he recalled some of his Indian adventures in two books, Down the Living Spine of India (2010), a detailed account of a journey on an Enfield motorbike through the Western Ghats, and Elephants Have Gone East, Sir (2015), a collection of short stories. He retired in 2016.
Peter is survived by his partner, Suki Thompson, by two daughters, India and me, from his marriage to Sheila (nee Merrony), which ended in divorce, and his grandchildren, Romy and Dashiell.
