Carol Downer, a frontrunner within the feminist ladies’s well being motion who drew nationwide fame for her function in a case often known as the Nice Yogurt Conspiracy — so named as a result of she was charged with training medication with out a license for shelling 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 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 Nineteen 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 he or she was decided that others shouldn’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 method, and he was utilizing it to carry out early-term abortions and instructing docs find out how to use it.
Ms. Downer and others thought the method was so easy that it could possibly be carried out with out medical coaching. They discovered to apply 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. Medical doctors referred to as the method a vacuum extraction. The ladies referred to as it a menstrual extraction — it was additionally a strategy to to manage menstrual circulation — as a type of linguistic feint.
Ms. Downer got down to clarify its use to a gaggle 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 gave the impression to be an much more suspect apply.
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 Girls’s Well being E-book Collective, who would go on to provide the self-help bible “Our Our bodies, Ourselves” — she turned 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 apply probably the most unique concepts of the twentieth century.
“The concept of girls having the ability to management their very own birthrate is key. It goes proper to the guts of girls’s political scenario,” Ms. Downer instructed 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 ladies equal with males.”
They opened their first clinic in Los Angeles in 1971. The following 12 months, 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 medication 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 superb 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 girls’s research professor, recounted in “Wanting By the Speculum: Inspecting the Girls’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 have been sprouting up everywhere in the nation. Although many within the ladies’s well being motion have been additionally working to get rid of gender bias within the medical occupation, notably with regard to reproductive well being, and to assist those that wanted it most achieve entry to medical companies, Ms. Downer remained leery of what she felt was a patriarchal establishment incapable of reform. She was not satisfied that change was attainable.
She and others went on to discovered the nonprofit Federation of Feminist Girls’s Well being Facilities, and he or she continued to analysis the methods ladies may 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 apply the process.
“Carol Downer demonstrated a really reckless type of braveness and defiance,” Phyllis Chesler, the feminist psychologist, activist and creator, mentioned in an interview. “I had an issue with the paranoia across the medical occupation, and though I in fact harbored the same mistrust, I didn’t assume it was secure or smart to place abortions within the arms 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 docs 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 secure when practiced by a medical skilled.
“There are dangers and problems if it’s completed improper, notably uterine perforation,” she mentioned in an interview, “which is what we prepare to not do. I’m totally in help 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 won’t have entry to those professionals.”
In 1993, Ms. Downer and Rebecca Chalker, an abortion counselor, revealed “A Lady’s E-book of Decisions: Abortion, Menstrual Extraction, RU-486,” basically a client information to abortion.
Le Anne Schreiber, writing in The New York Occasions E-book Evaluation, 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 colleges train the strategies, 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 12 months when she was pregnant along with her first little one. 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 12 months on welfare, an expertise that Ms. Downer later mentioned politicized her. Not like most welfare recipients, she and her husband had further help. 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 academics.
“I started to step by step develop a radical political consciousness,” she mentioned in an oral historical past performed by the Veteran Feminists of America in 2021. “I primarily discovered that nobody survives on welfare with out some type of casual help community or a hustle.”
She had 4 kids 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 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 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 legislation.
“There’s a by way of line from Carol Downer to the present reproductive rights and reproductive justice activists,” mentioned Dr. Houck, the creator of “Wanting By the Speculum.” “Hers was a type of activism the place ladies may use their heads, their arms and their hearts.”