Carol Downer, a pacesetter within the feminist girls’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 out a license for meting out yogurt to deal with a yeast an infection — died on Jan. 13 in Glendale, Calif. She was 91.
Her dying, in a hospital, was confirmed by her daughter Angela Sales space, who mentioned she had suffered a coronary heart assault a couple of 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 Girls. 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 way for performing an abortion by suctioning the liner of a girls’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 educating medical doctors how you can use it.
Ms. Downer and others thought the method was so easy that it might 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 system right into a package she patented known as the Del-Em, which included a versatile tube, a syringe and a jar. Medical doctors known as the method a vacuum extraction. The ladies known as it a menstrual extraction — it was additionally a method to to control menstrual circulate — 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 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 shedding her viewers. They had been horrified. This was the period of back-room abortions, when girls had 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 Girls’s Well being Guide Collective, who would go on to supply the self-help bible “Our Our bodies, Ourselves” — she turned decided to show girls 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 follow probably the most unique concepts of the twentieth century.
“The concept of ladies with the ability to management their very own birthrate is prime. It goes proper to the center of ladies’s political state of affairs,” Ms. Downer informed The Los Angeles Occasions when Ms. Rothman died in 2007. “We each wished to show the entire thing the other way up. We wished to make girls equal with males.”
They opened their first clinic in Los Angeles in 1971. The subsequent 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, had been charged with practising drugs with out a license. Ms. Downer’s crime was her yogurt therapy, 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 acquired a high-quality 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 widespread that it didn’t require a physician’s analysis. The jury agreed, and as Judith A. Houck, a gender and ladies’s research professor, recounted in “Trying By means of the Speculum: Analyzing the Girls’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 girls’s clinics, which had been sprouting up all around the nation. Although many within the girls’s well being motion had been additionally working to get rid of 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 Girls’s Well being Facilities, and she or he continued to analysis the methods girls might 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 educating; they had 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 writer, mentioned in an interview. “I had an issue with the paranoia across the medical career, and though I after all harbored an identical mistrust, I didn’t assume it was protected or sensible 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 method devised by Mr. Karman, turned the most typical surgical process utilized by medical doctors to finish a being pregnant. It nonetheless is, mentioned Dr. Louise P. King, assistant professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive biology at Harvard Medical Faculty. The method, she added, is protected when practiced by a medical skilled.
“There are dangers and issues if it’s carried out unsuitable, notably uterine perforation,” she mentioned in an interview, “which is what we practice to not do. I’m absolutely in assist of those that need 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 won’t have entry to those professionals.”
In 1993, Ms. Downer and Rebecca Chalker, an abortion counselor, printed “A Lady’s Guide of Selections: Abortion, Menstrual Extraction, RU-486,” basically a shopper information to abortion.
Le Anne Schreiber, writing in The New York Occasions Guide Overview, known as it “a print hotline in a time of government-ordered gag guidelines” in addition to “a warning signal.”
“When so few medical doctors carry out abortions,» she wrote, “when so few medical colleges educate the methods, when so many states search to impose so many restrictions, girls 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 faculty 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 mentioned politicized her. In contrast to most welfare recipients, she and her husband had further assist. They lived hire free in a home owned by her dad and mom, and so they acquired monetary assist from his dad and mom and fellow lecturers.
“I started to progressively develop a radical political consciousness,” she mentioned 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 youngsters and was separated from her husband when she turned 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 protected, 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 rise 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 Nineteen 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 line from Carol Downer to the present reproductive rights and reproductive justice activists,” mentioned Dr. Houck, the writer of “Trying By means of the Speculum.” “Hers was a type of activism the place girls might use their heads, their palms and their hearts.”
