Carol Downer, a frontrunner within the feminist ladies’s well being motion who drew nationwide fame for her position in a case generally known as the Nice Yogurt Conspiracy — so named as a result of she was charged with training drugs and not using a license for dishing out yogurt to deal with a yeast an infection — died on Jan. 13 in Glendale, Calif. She was 91.
Her loss of life, in a hospital, was confirmed by her daughter Angela Sales space, who stated she had suffered a coronary heart assault just a few weeks earlier.
Ms. Downer was a self-described housewife and the mom of six within the late Sixties when she joined the ladies’s motion and started to work on the abortion committee of her native chapter of the Nationwide Group for Ladies. Years earlier, she had had an unlawful abortion, and she or he was decided that others shouldn’t undergo as she did.
A psychologist named Harvey Karman had refined a method for performing an abortion by suctioning the liner of a ladies’s uterus. It was safer, faster and fewer painful than the extra conventional dilation and curettage method, and he was utilizing it to carry out early-term abortions and instructing docs the best way to use it.
Ms. Downer and others thought the method was so easy that it may very well be carried out with out medical coaching. They discovered to follow the process themselves.
Lorraine Rothman, one other member of NOW, refined Mr. Karman’s gadget right into a package she patented referred to as the Del-Em, which included a versatile tube, a syringe and a jar. Docs referred to as the method a vacuum extraction. The ladies referred to as it a menstrual extraction — it was additionally a solution to to control menstrual circulation — as a type of linguistic feint.
Ms. Downer got down to clarify its use to a bunch of girls at a feminist bookstore in Venice Seaside. As she later recalled, when she started to explain the method, which concerned inserting the tube into the cervix, she realized that she was dropping her viewers. They have been horrified. This was the period of back-room abortions, when ladies have been dying from unsafe procedures, and right here she was hawking what appeared to be an much more suspect follow.
So she modified ways. She lay down on a desk, hiked up her skirt, inserted a speculum into her vagina and invited her viewers to look. The dialog veered from do-it-yourself abortions to an anatomy lesson.
The ladies had by no means seen inside their very own vaginas — it was not the behavior of male gynecologists in these days to coach their sufferers about their very own anatomy — and it was an “aha” second for Ms. Downer. Like many ladies across the nation — notably these within the Boston Ladies’s Well being E book Collective, who would go on to provide the self-help bible “Our Our bodies, Ourselves” — she grew to become decided to show ladies about their reproductive well being.
She and Ms. Rothman toured the nation demonstrating cervical exams — and menstrual extraction. They so impressed the distinguished anthropologist Margaret Mead that she declared the follow one of the vital authentic concepts of the twentieth century.
“The concept of girls with the ability to management their very own birthrate is prime. It goes proper to the center of girls’s political state of affairs,” Ms. Downer advised The Los Angeles Instances when Ms. Rothman died in 2007. “We each needed to show the entire thing the other way up. We needed to make ladies equal with males.”
They opened their first clinic in Los Angeles in 1971. The following yr, the police raided the place and confiscated, amongst different issues, a bath of strawberry yogurt. Because the story goes, a clinic employee protested: “You may’t have that. That’s my lunch!”
Ms. Downer and a colleague, Carol Wilson, have been charged with training drugs and not using a license. Ms. Downer’s crime was her yogurt remedy, and Ms. Wilson’s was that she had fitted a lady with a diaphragm. Ms. Wilson was additionally charged with performing a menstrual extraction, conducting being pregnant testing and giving a pelvic examination. She pleaded responsible to the diaphragm cost and acquired a advantageous and probation.
Ms. Downer determined to battle the yogurt cost. Utilizing yogurt to deal with a yeast an infection, her protection claimed, was an previous folks treatment, and in any case a yeast an infection was so frequent that it didn’t require a physician’s prognosis. The jury agreed, and as Judith A. Houck, a gender and ladies’s research professor, recounted in “Wanting By the Speculum: Inspecting the Ladies’s Well being Motion” (2024), the male foreman despatched Ms. Downer a notice of appreciation.
“Carol — You’re not a downer, you’re an actual higher!” he wrote. “Good Luck!”
The Nice Yogurt Conspiracy helped popularize ladies’s clinics, which have been sprouting up everywhere in the nation. Although many within the ladies’s well being motion have been additionally working to remove gender bias within the medical occupation, significantly with regard to reproductive well being, and to assist those that wanted it most acquire entry to medical providers, Ms. Downer remained leery of what she felt was a patriarchal establishment incapable of reform. She was not satisfied that change was doable.
She and others went on to discovered the nonprofit Federation of Feminist Ladies’s Well being Facilities, and she or he continued to analysis the methods ladies might handle their very own fertility.
But many feminists, abortion rights supporters and medical professionals have been greater than uncomfortable with Ms. Downer and Ms. Rothman’s instructing; they have been deeply against having laypeople follow the process.
“Carol Downer demonstrated a really reckless type of braveness and defiance,” Phyllis Chesler, the feminist psychologist, activist and creator, stated in an interview. “I had an issue with the paranoia across the medical occupation, and though I in fact harbored an identical mistrust, I didn’t assume it was secure or sensible to place abortions within the arms of amateurs.”
Within the years after the Roe v. Wade determination assured a lady’s constitutional proper to an abortion, vacuum extraction, the method devised by Mr. Karman, grew to become the most typical surgical process utilized by docs to finish a being pregnant. It nonetheless is, stated Dr. Louise P. King, assistant professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive biology at Harvard Medical College. The method, she added, is secure when practiced by a medical skilled.
“There are dangers and problems if it’s carried out improper, notably uterine perforation,” she stated in an interview, “which is what we practice to not do. I’m totally in assist of those that wish to take management of their well being and their lives, and it saddens me to assume individuals might need to show to those strategies with out the assistance of pros, that they may not have entry to those professionals.”
In 1993, Ms. Downer and Rebecca Chalker, an abortion counselor, printed “A Lady’s E book of Selections: Abortion, Menstrual Extraction, RU-486,” primarily a client information to abortion.
Le Anne Schreiber, writing in The New York Instances E book Evaluate, referred to as it “a print hotline in a time of government-ordered gag guidelines” in addition to “a warning signal.”
“When so few docs carry out abortions,” she wrote, “when so few medical faculties educate the methods, when so many states search to impose so many restrictions, ladies reluctantly start to take dangers that different individuals name decisions.”
Carollyn Aurilla Chatham was born on Oct. 9, 1933, in Shawnee, Okla., and grew up there and in Glendale. Her father, Meade Chatham, was a clerk in a gasoline firm; her mom, Nell (Stell) Chatham, was a secretary.
Carol studied sociology on the College of California, Los Angeles, however dropped out throughout her first yr when she was pregnant along with her first baby. Her husband, Earle Wallace Brown, stayed in faculty and labored as a cabdriver after which a special-education trainer earlier than contracting tuberculosis.
The household spent a yr on welfare, an expertise that Ms. Downer later stated politicized her. In contrast to most welfare recipients, she and her husband had extra assist. They lived lease free in a home owned by her dad and mom, they usually acquired monetary assist from his dad and mom and fellow lecturers.
“I started to steadily develop a radical political consciousness,” she stated in an oral historical past carried out by the Veteran Feminists of America in 2021. “I primarily discovered that nobody survives on welfare with out some type of casual assist community or a hustle.”
She had 4 kids and was separated from her husband when she grew to become pregnant, and determined to have an abortion. It was 1962, 5 years earlier than abortion was legalized in California and 11 years earlier than Roe. Whereas the process was carried out by somebody with expertise and was medically secure, she acquired no anesthesia in order that if the place — an workplace with no furnishings beside a desk — was raided by the police, she might stand up and run.
Along with Ms. Sales space, Ms. Downer, who lived in Los Angeles, is survived by two different daughters, Laura Brown and Shelby Coleman; two sons, David Brown and Frank Downer Jr.; eight grandchildren; and several other great-grandchildren. Her second husband, Frank Downer, whom she married in 1965 after her divorce from Mr. Brown, died in 2012. A daughter, Victoria Siegel, died in 2021.
Ms. Downer went again to highschool within the late Eighties. After incomes a level from Whittier Regulation College, in Costa Mesa, Calif., in 1991, she practiced immigration and employment legislation.
“There’s a by line from Carol Downer to the present reproductive rights and reproductive justice activists,” stated Dr. Houck, the creator of “Wanting By the Speculum.” “Hers was a type of activism the place ladies might use their heads, their arms and their hearts.”
