Select Page

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

Carol Downer, feminist leader at 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 called the Great Yogurt Conspiracy – so named because she was charged with practicing medicine without a license for dispensing yogurt to treat a yeast infection – has died is January 13th in Glendale, California. She was 91.

Her death in a hospital was confirmed by her daughter Angela Booth, who said she had suffered a heart attack several 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 an illegal abortion and she was determined that others should not suffer like she did.

A A psychologist named Harvey Karman had refined a technique for performing an abortion by suctioning the lining of a woman’s uterus. It was safer, faster, and less painful than the more traditional dilation and curving technique, and he used it to perform early abortions and teach doctors how to use it.

Ms. Downer and others found the technique so simple that it could be performed without medical training. They learned to practice the procedure themselves.

Lorraine Rothman, another member of Now, refined Mr. Karman’s device into a kit she patented called Del-EM, which included a flexible tube, a syringe and a glass. Doctors called the technique a vacuum extraction. The women called it a menstrual withdrawal – it was also a way to regulate menstrual flow – as a kind of linguistic feint.

Ms. Downer set out to explain to a group of women at a feminist bookstore in Venice Beach. As she later recalled, as she began to describe the technique, which involved inserting the tube into the cervix, she realized she was losing her audience. They were horrified. This was the era of backroom abortions, when women died from unsafe procedures, and here an even more suspicious practice took hold.

So she changed tactics. She lay down on a table, hiked up her skirt, inserted a speculum into her vagina and invited her audience to watch. The conversation shifted from abortions to anatomy from DIY to anatomy.

The women had never looked inside their own vaginas – it wasn’t the habit of male gynecologists in those days to educate their patients about their own anatomy – and it was an “AHA” moment for Ms Downer. Like many women across the country—particularly those in the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, who produce the self-help bible “Our Bodies, Ourselves”—she became determined to educate women about their reproductive health.

She and Ms. Rothman toured the country demonstrating cervical examinations – and menstrual extraction. They so impressed prominent anthropologist Margaret Mead that she declared the 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 when Ms. Rothman died in 2007. “We both wanted to turn the whole thing on its head. We wanted to make women equal to men. “

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

Ms. Downer and a colleague, Carol Wilson, were accused of practicing medicine without a license. Ms. Downer’s crime was her yogurt treatment, and Ms. Wilson’s was that she had installed a woman with a diaphragm. Ms Wilson was also accused of performing a menstrual extraction, pregnancy testing and a pelvic exam. She pleaded guilty to the diaphragm charge and received a fine and probation.

Ms. Downer decided to fight the yogurt charge. The use of yogurt to treat a yeast infection was an ancient folk remedy, and in any case, a yeast infection was so common that it did not require a doctor’s diagnosis. The jury agreed, and as Judith A. Houck, a professor of gender and women’s studies, recounted in “Looking Through the Speculum: Examining the Women’s Health Movement” (2024), the male foreman sent Ms. Downer a commendation.

“Carol – you’re not a downer, you’re a real upper!” he wrote. “Good luck!”

The Great Yogurt Conspiracy helped popularize women’s health clinics sprouting across the country. Although many in the women’s health movement also worked to eliminate gender bias in the medical profession, particularly with regard to reproductive health, and to help those who needed it gain access to medical services, a patriarchal institution that did not is able to make reform. She was not convinced that change was possible.

She and others found the nonprofit Federation of Feminist Women’s Health Centers and continued to study the ways women might manage their own fertility.

But many feminists, abortion rights advocates and medical professionals were more than uncomfortable with Ms. Downer and Ms. Rothman’s teachings. They were deeply opposed to laypeople practicing the procedure.

“Carol Downer showed a very ruthless form of courage and defiance,” said Phyllis Chesler, the feminist psychologist, activist and author, in an interview. “I had a problem with the paranoia surrounding the medical profession, and while I naturally had a similar distrust, I didn’t think it was safe or wise to put abortions in the hands of amateurs.”

In the years following the Roe v. Wade decision, the Constitution guaranteed a woman’s right to have an abortion, vacuum extraction, the technique developed by Mr. Karman, the most common surgical procedure used by doctors to terminate a pregnancy. It still is, said Dr. Louise P. King, assistant professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive biology at Harvard Medical School. The technique, she added, is safe when practiced by a doctor.

“There are risks and complications if it’s done incorrectly, particularly uterine perforation,” she said in an interview, “which we don’t train on. I support those who want to take control of their health and their lives and it saddens me to think that people have to turn to these methods without the help of professionals so they may not have access to these professionals. ”

In 1993, Ms. Downer and Rebecca Chalker, an abortion counselor, published “A Woman’s Book of Choices: Abortion, Menstrual Extraction, Ru-486,” essentially a consumer guide to abortion.

Le Anne Schreiber, writing in the New York Times Book Review, called it “a print hotline in a time of government-mandated GAG regulations” as well as “a warning sign.”

“When so few doctors perform abortions,” she wrote, “when so few medical schools teach the techniques, when so many states want to impose so many restrictions, women reluctantly begin to take risks that other people call choices.”

Carollyn Aurilla Chatham was born Oct. 9, 1933, in Shawnee, Okla., and grew up there and in Glendale. Her father, Meade Chatham, was a gas company employee; Her mother, Nell (Stell) Chatham, was a secretary.

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

The family spent a year on welfare, an experience that Ms. Downer later said she politicized. 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 help from his parents and colleagues.

“I gradually began to develop a radical political consciousness,” she said in a 2021 oral history of Veteran Feminists of America.

She had four children and was separated from her husband when she became pregnant and decided to have an abortion. It was 1962, five years before abortion was legalized in California and 11 years before Roe. While the procedure was performed by someone with experience and was medically safe, she received no anesthesia, so when the location – an office with no furniture next to a table – was searched by police, she could get up and run.

In addition to 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 her divorce from Mr. Brown, died in 2012. A daughter, Victoria Siegel, died in 2021.

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

“There is a through line from Carol Downer to current reproductive rights and reproductive justice activists,” said Dr. Houck, the author of Sheoring the Speculum. “Hers was a form of activism where women could use their heads, their hands and their hearts.”

About The Author

Leave a reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

RECENT REVIEWS

Recent Videos

Loading...