Carol Downer, a pioneer in the feminist women’s health movement who drew national notoriety for her role in a case known as the Great Yogurt Conspiracy — so named because she was accused of practicing medicine without a license for dispensing yogurt to treat yeast infections — died on January 13 in Glendale, California, at 91. .
Her death, at a hospital, was confirmed by her daughter, Angela Booth, who said she had suffered a heart attack a few weeks earlier.
Ms. Downer was a self-described housewife and mother of six in the late 1960s when she joined the women’s movement and began working on the abortion committee of her local chapter of the National Organization for Women. Years earlier, she had had an illegal abortion, and was determined that others should not suffer as she did.
A Psychologist named Harvey Carman He refined a technique for performing an abortion by aspirating the lining of a woman’s uterus. It was safer, faster, and less painful than the traditional dilation and translation technique, and he used it to perform early abortions and teach doctors how to use it.
Ms. Downer and others thought the technique was so simple that it could be performed without medical training. They learned to practice the procedure themselves.
Loren Rothman, another NOW member, improved on Mr. Carman’s device in a patented kit called DEL-EM, which included a flexible tube, syringe and jar. Doctors called the technique vacuum extraction. Women called it menstrual extraction – it was also a way to regulate menstrual flow – as a kind of linguistic trick.
Ms. Downer proceeded to explain its use to a group of women at a feminist bookstore in Venice Beach. As she later recalled, when she started describing the technique, which involved inserting the tube into the cervix, she realized she was losing her audience. They were terrified. This was the era of back-room abortions, when women were dying from unsafe procedures, and here she was wandering into what seemed to be a more questionable practice.
So I changed tactics. She lay down on a table, lifted her skirt, inserted the cock into her vagina and invited her audience to look. The conversation veered from abortions to an anatomy lesson.
The women had never seen the inside of their own vaginas — it was not the custom of gynecologists in those days to educate their patients about their anatomy — and it was an “aha” moment for Ms. Downer. Like many women across the country—particularly those at Boston’s Women’s Health Writers, who would go on to produce the self-help bible. “Our bodies, ourselves” She became determined to teach women about their reproductive health.
She and Ms. Rothman toured the country showing Pap tests — and menstrual extractions. They impressed eminent anthropologists Margaret Mead They declared the practice one of the most original ideas of the twentieth century.
“The idea of women being able to control their births is fundamental. It goes to the heart of women’s political status,” When Ms. Rothman died in 2007, Ms. Downer told the Los Angeles Times. “We both wanted to turn everything around. We wanted to make women equal to men.”
They opened their first clinic in Los Angeles in 1971. The following year, police raided the place and confiscated, among other things, a tub of strawberry yogurt. As the story goes, the clinic worker protested: “You can’t have that. This is my lunch!”
Ms. Downer and a colleague, Carol Wilson, were charged with practicing medicine without a license. Mrs. Downer’s crime was the yoghurt treatment, and Mrs. Wilson’s was that she fitted a woman with a diaphragm. Ms Wilson was also accused of performing a menstrual extraction, administering a pregnancy test and giving a pelvic exam. She pleaded guilty to the midriff charge and received a fine and probation.
Ms. Downer decided to fight the yogurt charge. Her defense claimed, using yogurt to treat yeast infections, was an ancient folk remedy, and in any case yeast infections were so common that they did not require a doctor’s diagnosis. The jury agreedand between Judith A. hook, Professor of Gender and Women’s Studiesrecounted in “Looking Through the Spyglass: An Examination of the Women’s Health Movement” (2024), a masculine man sent Ms. Downer a note of appreciation.
“Carol – you’re not a downer, you’re a real top!” books. “good luck!”
The Great Yogurt Conspiracy helped popularize women’s clinics, which were selling out across the country. Although many in the women’s health movement were also working to eliminate gender bias in the medical profession, especially with regard to reproductive health, and to help those who needed access to medical services, Ms. Downer remained loyal to what she felt was an incapable patriarchal institution. On repair. She wasn’t convinced that change was possible.
She and others joined the nonprofit Federation of Feminist Women’s Health Centers and continued to research ways women could manage their fertility.
However, many feminists, abortion rights supporters, and medical professionals were more than uncomfortable with Ms. Downer and Ms. Rothman’s teaching; They were deeply opposed to having ordinary people practice the procedure.
“Carol Downer demonstrated a very reckless form of courage and defiance,” Phyllis Chesler, a feminist psychologist, activist and author, said in an interview. )
In the years since Roe v. Wade guarantees women’s constitutional right to abortion Vacuum extraction, the technique pioneered by Mr. Karman, has become the most common surgical procedure doctors use to terminate a pregnancy. Dr. Louise B. said: King, assistant professor of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive biology at Harvard Medical School, says it still is. She added that this technique is safe when practiced by a medical professional.
“There are risks and complications if done wrong, especially uterine perforation,” which we are trained not to do, she said in an interview. I fully support those who want to take control of their health and lives, and it saddens me to think that people may have to resort to these methods without the help of professionals, and that they may not have access to these professionals. “
In 1993, Ms. Downer and Rebecca Chalker, an abortion counselor, published “The Book of Women’s Choices: Abortion, Menstrual Extraction, RU-486,” essentially a consumer’s guide to abortion.
Lou Anne Schreiber, Writing in the New York Times Book Reviewcalled it a “printed hotline at the time of the government’s rules gag” as well as a “warning sign.”
“When too few doctors perform abortions, when too few medical schools teach techniques, when too many states seek to impose too many restrictions, women reluctantly begin to take risks that others call options,” she wrote.
Carolyn Aurela Chatham was born on October 9, 1933, in Shawnee, Okla., and grew up there and in Glendale. Her father, Mead Chatham, was a clerk for a gas company; Her mother, Nell (Steele) Chatham, was a secretary.
Carol studied sociology at UCLA, but dropped out during her junior year when she was pregnant with her first child. Her husband, Earl Wallace Brown, remained in college and worked as a taxi driver and then a private tutor before contracting tuberculosis.
The family spent a year in luxury, an experience Mrs. Downer later told of. Unlike most welfare recipients, she and her husband had additional support. They lived rent free in a house owned by her parents, and received financial assistance from his parents and fellow teachers.
“I began to gradually develop a radical political consciousness,” she said in an oral history conducted by Veteran Feminists of America in 2021. “I mainly learned that no one survives on welfare without some sort of informal support network or hustle.”
She had four children and they were separated from her husband when she became pregnant, and she decided to have an abortion. That was 1962, five years before California abortion and 11 years before ROE. Although the procedure was performed by someone with experience and was medically safe, she received no anesthesia, so that if the place—an office with no furniture next to a table—was trafficked by police, she might get up and run.
In addition to Mrs. Booth, Mrs. Downer, who lived in Los Angeles, 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 her divorce from Mr. Brown, died in 2012. A daughter, Victoria Siegel, died in 2021.
Mrs. Downer returned to school in the late 1980s. After earning a degree from Whittier Law School, in Costa Mesa, California, in 1991, she practiced immigration and employment law.
“There is a line through Carol Downer to current reproductive rights activists and reproductive justice activists,” said Dr. Hook, author of Looking Through Spyglass. “It was a form of activism where women could use their heads, hands and hearts.”
