Carol Downer, feminist leader for women’s health, dies at 91

Carol Downer, a leader in the feminist women’s health movement who gained national fame for her role in a case known as the Great Yogurt Conspiracy – so named because she was accused of practicing medicine without a license to dispense yogurt to treat a yeast infection – died on January 13 in Glendale, California. She was 91 years aged.

Her death in hospital was confirmed by her daughter Angela Booth, who said she had suffered a heart attack a few weeks earlier.

In the tardy 1960s, Mrs. Downer was a self-made housewife and mother of six children when she joined the women’s movement and began working on the abortion committee of the local chapter of the National Organization for Women. She had had an illegal abortion many years earlier and was determined that others would not suffer as she did.

AND psychologist named Harvey Karman perfected the technique of performing abortion by suctioning the lining of the woman’s uterus. It was safer, faster, and less painful than the more customary dilation and curettage technique, which is why he used it to perform premature abortions and taught doctors how to apply it.

Mrs. Downer and others believed the technique was so basic that it could be used without medical training. They learned to practice this procedure themselves.

Lorraine Rothman, another NOW member, refined Mr. Karman’s device into a kit she patented called Del-Em, which included a elastic tube, a syringe and a jar. Doctors called this technique vacuum extraction. Women called it menstrual extraction – it was also a way to regulate menstrual flow – as a kind of tongue trick.

Mrs. Downer decided to explain its apply to a group of women at a feminist bookstore in Venice Beach. As she later recalled, when she began to describe the technique of inserting a tube into the cervix, she realized she was losing her audience. They were terrified. This was the era of backroom abortion, when women were dying from unsafe procedures, and she was promoting something that seemed even more questionable.

So she changed her tactics. She lay on the table, lifted her skirt, inserted a speculum into her vagina and invited the audience to watch. The conversation turned from DIY abortions to an anatomy lesson.

Women had never seen the inside of their vaginas – in those days, male gynecologists were not in the habit of informing their patients about their own anatomy – and for Ms. Downer it was an “aha” moment. Like many women across the country—especially members of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, who later published the self-help bible, Our Bodies, Our Bodies—she was determined to teach women about their reproductive health.

She and Ms. Rothman traveled around the country demonstrating cervical screening and menstrual removal. They made such an impression on the eminent anthropologist Margaret Mead that she considered this practice one of the most original ideas of the 20th century.

“The idea that women can control their own birth rate is fundamental. “It goes straight to the heart of women’s political situation,” Ms. Downer told the Los Angeles Times about Ms. Rothman’s death in 2007. “We both wanted to turn the whole thing upside down. We wanted to make women equal with men.”

They opened their first clinic in Los Angeles in 1971. The following year, police raided the place and confiscated, among other items, a tube of strawberry yogurt. As the story goes, a clinic employee protested, “You can’t have that. This is my lunch!”

Ms Downer and her colleague Carol Wilson were charged with practicing medicine without a license. Mrs Downer’s crime was the yoghurt treatment and Mrs Wilson’s was giving a woman a diaphragm. Ms Wilson was also charged with aborting her period, performing a pregnancy test and performing a pelvic examination. She pleaded guilty to the diaphragm charge and received a fine and probation.

Mrs. Downer decided to fight the yogurt allegation. Her defense claimed that using yogurt to treat yeast infections was an aged folk remedy and, in any case, the yeast infection was so common that it did not require a doctor’s diagnosis. The jury agreed and, as Judith A. Houck stated, professor of gender and women’s studiesAs described in “Looking Through the Speculum: An Examination of the Women’s Health Movement” (2024), the foreman sent Mrs. Downer a letter of appreciation.

“Carol – you are not a bottom, you are truly a top!” he wrote. “Good luck!”

The Great Yogurt Conspiracy helped popularize women’s clinics that sprang up across the country. Although many in the women’s health movement were also working to eliminate gender bias in the medical profession, particularly as it relates to reproductive health, and to facilitate those most in need gain access to health services, Ms. Downer was wary of what she believed considered inappropriate. a patriarchal institution incapable of reform. She wasn’t convinced that change was possible.

She and others founded the nonprofit Federation of Feminist Women’s Health Centers and continued to research ways women can manage their own fertility.

However, many feminists, abortion rights advocates and health care workers were more than uncomfortable with the teachings of Ms. Downer and Ms. Rothman; they were deeply opposed to lay people practicing this procedure.

“Carol Downer demonstrated a very reckless form of courage and rebellion,” Phyllis Chesler, a feminist psychologist, activist and author, said in an interview. “I had a problem with paranoia around doctors, and while I obviously harbored similar distrust, I didn’t think it was safe and sound or prudent to put abortions in the hands of amateurs.”

In the years after the Roe v. Wade decision, which guaranteed a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion, vacuum extraction, a technique developed by Mr. Karman, became the most common surgical procedure used by doctors to terminate pregnancies. That’s still the case, said Dr. Louise P. King, assistant professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive biology at Harvard Medical School. She added that the technique is safe and sound if used by a doctor.

“If done incorrectly, there are risks and complications, especially uterine perforation,” she said in an interview, “and that’s what we’re learning about. I fully support those who want to take control of their health and lives, and it saddens me to think that people will be forced to turn to these methods without the facilitate of specialists and therefore may not have access to these specialists. “

In 1993, Ms. Downer and Rebecca Chalker, an abortion counselor, published “The Women’s Choice Book: Abortion, Abortion, RU-486,” essentially a consumer guide to abortion.

Le Anne Schreiber, writing in The Fresh York Times Book Review, called it “a print hotline in an era of government-mandated gag rules” and a “warning sign.”

“When so few doctors perform abortions,” she wrote, “when so few medical schools teach such techniques, when so many states seek to impose so many restrictions, women become reluctant to take the risks that others call a choice.”

Carollyn Aurilla Chatham was born on October 9, 1933 in Shawnee, Oklahoma and grew up there and in Glendale. Her father, Meade Chatham, was a clerk for a gas company; her mother, Nell (Stell) Chatham, was a secretary.

Carol studied sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, but dropped out during her junior year while pregnant with her first child. Her husband, Earle Wallace Brown, stayed in college and worked as a taxi driver and then a special education teacher before he contracted tuberculosis.

The family spent a year on welfare benefits, which Mrs Downer says later politicized them. Unlike most welfare recipients, she and her husband received additional support. They lived for free in a house owned by her parents and received financial assistance from his parents and fellow teachers.

“I gradually began to develop a radical political consciousness.” she said in a 2021 oral history interview with Veteran Feminists of America. “First of all, I learned that no one survives on welfare without some informal support network or hustle.”

She had four children, and when she became pregnant, she was separated from her husband and decided to have an abortion. The year was 1962, five years before abortion was legalized in California and 11 years before Roe. Although the procedure was performed by an experienced person and was medically safe and sound, she was not given anesthesia so that if the police broke into the place – an office with no furniture next to the table – she could get up and run away.

Besides Mrs. Booth, Mrs. Downer, who lived in Los Angeles is survived by two other daughters, Laura Brown and Shelby Coleman; two sons, David Brown and Frank Downer Jr.; eight grandchildren; and several great-grandchildren. Her second husband, Frank Downer, whom she married in 1965 after divorcing Mr. Brown, died in 2012. Daughter Victoria Siegel died in 2021.

Ms. Downer returned to school in the tardy 1980s. After graduating from Whittier Law School in Costa Mesa, California, in 1991, she practiced immigration and employment law.

“There is a direct line from Carol Downer to current reproductive rights and reproductive justice activists,” said Dr. Houck, author of “Looking Through the Speculum.” “It was a form of activism in which women could apply their heads, hands and hearts.”