Dr. Jean Pakter, a former health official who made New York City a national model for providing safe, legal abortions and led an innovative effort to educate women about the benefits of birth control, prenatal nutrition and breast-feeding, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. She was 101.

Her death was confirmed by her daughter, Dr. Ellen B. Mendelson.

Dr. Pakter, who headed the bureau of maternity services and family planning in the city’s health department from 1960 to 1982, was also recognized for landmark research in the 1960s on women’s reproductive health that influenced several defining political events of her time, including the War on Poverty in the 1960s and the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade.

Abortion was still illegal during Dr. Pakter’s early years in public health, and she had the task of compiling reports about the commerce in abortion. These reports provided some of the few reliable estimates in the country about the number of women injured or killed by illegal practitioners. (There were dozens each year in the city.) She worked actively to support a state law, passed in 1970, that gave women in New York the right to abortion, three years before it was legalized nationally.

The enactment of the state law created a flood of patients to New York and a sudden outcropping of abortion clinics.