Carol Downer, a pacesetter within the feminist ladies’s well being motion who drew nationwide fame for her position in a case often known as the Nice Yogurt Conspiracy — so named as a result of she was charged with practising drugs with no license for meting out yogurt to deal with a yeast an infection — died on Jan. 13 in Glendale, Calif. She was 91.
Her demise, 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 commenced 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 mustn’t endure 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 approach, and he was utilizing it to carry out early-term abortions and instructing docs how one can use it.
Ms. Downer and others thought the approach was so easy that it might be carried out with out medical coaching. They discovered to observe the process themselves.
Lorraine Rothman, one other member of NOW, refined Mr. Karman’s machine right into a equipment she patented referred to as the Del-Em, which included a versatile tube, a syringe and a jar. Docs referred to as the approach a vacuum extraction. The ladies referred to as it a menstrual extraction — it was additionally a solution to to manage menstrual movement — as a form of linguistic feint.
Ms. Downer got down to clarify its use to a bunch of ladies at a feminist bookstore in Venice Seashore. As she later recalled, when she started to explain the approach, which concerned inserting the tube into the cervix, she realized that she was dropping her viewers. They had been horrified. This was the period of back-room abortions, when ladies had been dying from unsafe procedures, and right here she was hawking what gave the impression to be an much more suspect observe.
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 teach 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 outstanding anthropologist Margaret Mead that she declared the observe some of the unique concepts of the twentieth century.
“The concept of ladies having the ability to management their very own birthrate is key. It goes proper to the center of ladies’s political state of affairs,” Ms. Downer advised The Los Angeles Instances when Ms. Rothman died in 2007. “We each wished to show the entire thing the wrong way up. We wished 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’ll be able to’t have that. That’s my lunch!”
Ms. Downer and a colleague, Carol Wilson, had been charged with practising drugs with no license. Ms. Downer’s crime was her yogurt remedy, and Ms. Wilson’s was that she had fitted a girl 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 obtained a effective and probation.
Ms. Downer determined to struggle the yogurt cost. Utilizing yogurt to deal with a yeast an infection, her protection claimed, was an outdated folks treatment, and in any case a yeast an infection was so frequent that it didn’t require a health care provider’s analysis. The jury agreed, and as Judith A. Houck, a gender and ladies’s research professor, recounted in “Trying By way of the Speculum: Analyzing the Ladies’s Well being Motion” (2024), the male foreman despatched Ms. Downer a observe 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 had been sprouting up all around the nation. Although many within the ladies’s well being motion had been additionally working to eradicate gender bias within the medical career, notably 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 may handle their very own fertility.
But many feminists, abortion rights supporters and medical professionals had been greater than uncomfortable with Ms. Downer and Ms. Rothman’s instructing; they had been deeply against having laypeople observe the process.
“Carol Downer demonstrated a really reckless type of braveness and defiance,” Phyllis Chesler, the feminist psychologist, activist and writer, stated in an interview. “I had an issue with the paranoia across the medical career, and though I after all harbored the same mistrust, I didn’t suppose it was secure or clever to place abortions within the palms of amateurs.”
Within the years after the Roe v. Wade determination assured a girl’s constitutional proper to an abortion, vacuum extraction, the approach devised by Mr. Karman, grew to become the commonest 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 Faculty. The approach, she added, is secure when practiced by a medical skilled.
“There are dangers and problems if it’s carried out unsuitable, 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 suppose individuals may need to show to those strategies with out the assistance of execs, that they may not have entry to those professionals.”
In 1993, Ms. Downer and Rebecca Chalker, an abortion counselor, printed “A Girl’s E book of Selections: Abortion, Menstrual Extraction, RU-486,” primarily a shopper information to abortion.
Le Anne Schreiber, writing in The New York Instances E book Assessment, 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 strategies, when so many states search to impose so many restrictions, ladies reluctantly start to take dangers that different individuals name selections.”
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 together with her first baby. Her husband, Earle Wallace Brown, stayed in school and labored as a cabdriver after which a special-education instructor earlier than contracting tuberculosis.
The household spent a yr on welfare, an expertise that Ms. Downer later stated politicized her. Not like most welfare recipients, she and her husband had further assist. They lived lease free in a home owned by her dad and mom, and so they obtained monetary assist from his dad and mom and fellow academics.
“I started to step by step 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 form 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 obtained no anesthesia in order that if the place — an workplace with no furnishings beside a desk — was raided by the police, she may 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 high school within the late Eighties. After incomes a level from Whittier Legislation Faculty, in Costa Mesa, Calif., in 1991, she practiced immigration and employment regulation.
“There’s a by means of line from Carol Downer to the present reproductive rights and reproductive justice activists,” stated Dr. Houck, the writer of “Trying By way of the Speculum.” “Hers was a type of activism the place ladies may use their heads, their palms and their hearts.”
