Carol Downer, Feminist Leader in Women’s Health, Dies at 91

Carol Downer, a frontrunner within the feminist ladies’s well being motion who drew nationwide fame for her function in a case referred to as the Nice Yogurt Conspiracy — so named as a result of she was charged with practising 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 demise, 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 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 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 educating docs the best way 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 machine 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 approach to to manage menstrual circulate — as a form of linguistic feint.

Ms. Downer got down to clarify its use to a gaggle 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 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 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 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 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 one of the vital authentic 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 needed to show the entire thing the wrong way up. We needed 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 bathtub 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, have been charged with practising medication with out a 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 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 outdated folks treatment, and in any case a yeast an infection was so widespread that it didn’t require a health care provider’s prognosis. The jury agreed, and as Judith A. Houck, a gender and girls’s research professor, recounted in “Wanting By means of the Speculum: Inspecting the Girls’s Well being Motion” (2024), the male foreman despatched Ms. Downer a word 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 all around 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 companies, 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 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 educating; 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 writer, mentioned in an interview. “I had an issue with the paranoia across the medical occupation, and though I in fact harbored an analogous mistrust, I didn’t suppose it was protected or smart to place abortions within the fingers 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 commonest 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 protected when practiced by a medical skilled.

“There are dangers and problems if it’s carried out flawed, notably uterine perforation,” she mentioned in an interview, “which is what we prepare 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 folks 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 Guide of Selections: Abortion, Menstrual Extraction, RU-486,” basically a client information to abortion.

Le Anne Schreiber, writing in The New York Instances Guide 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 educate the methods, when so many states search to impose so many restrictions, ladies reluctantly start to take dangers that different folks 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 fuel 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 together with her first baby. Her husband, Earle Wallace Brown, stayed in school and labored as a cabdriver after which a special-education trainer earlier than contracting tuberculosis.

The household spent a 12 months 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 academics.

“I started to progressively 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 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 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 line from Carol Downer to the present reproductive rights and reproductive justice activists,” mentioned Dr. Houck, the writer of “Wanting By means of the Speculum.” “Hers was a type of activism the place ladies might use their heads, their fingers and their hearts.”