Carol Downer, Feminist Chief in Ladies’s Well being, Dies at 91

Carol Downer, a pacesetter 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 practising drugs with out a license for dishing 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 Sixties when she joined the ladies’s motion and started to work on the abortion committee of her native chapter of the Nationwide Group for Ladies. Years earlier, she had had an unlawful abortion, and she or he was decided that others mustn’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 instructing medical doctors learn how to 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 observe the process themselves.

Lorraine Rothman, one other member of NOW, refined Mr. Karman’s gadget right into a equipment 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 option to to control menstrual movement — as a sort 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 observe.

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 Ladies’s Well being E-book Collective, who would go on to provide the self-help bible “Our Our bodies, Ourselves” — she grew to become 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 observe one of the crucial authentic concepts of the twentieth century.

“The concept of girls with the ability to management their very own birthrate is key. It goes proper to the guts of girls’s political state of affairs,” Ms. Downer instructed The Los Angeles Occasions when Ms. Rothman died in 2007. “We each needed to show the entire thing the other way up. We needed to make ladies 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 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 drugs 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 struggle 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 girls’s research professor, recounted in “Wanting By means of the Speculum: Inspecting the Ladies’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 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 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 attainable.

She and others went on to discovered the nonprofit Federation of Feminist Ladies’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 instructing; they have been deeply against having laypeople observe 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 after all harbored an analogous mistrust, I didn’t assume it was secure or sensible to place abortions within the arms of amateurs.”

Within the years after the Roe v. Wade resolution assured a girl’s constitutional proper to an abortion, vacuum extraction, the method devised by Mr. Karman, grew to become 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 secure when practiced by a medical skilled.

“There are dangers and problems if it’s performed incorrect, notably uterine perforation,” she mentioned in an interview, “which is what we practice to not do. I’m totally in help of those that need to take management of their well being and their lives, and it saddens me to assume folks might need to show to those strategies with out the assistance of execs, that they may not have entry to those professionals.”

In 1993, Ms. Downer and Rebecca Chalker, an abortion counselor, printed “A Girl’s E-book of Decisions: Abortion, Menstrual Extraction, RU-486,” primarily a shopper information to abortion.

Le Anne Schreiber, writing in The New York Occasions E-book Evaluation, 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 faculties 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 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 youngster. Her husband, Earle Wallace Brown, stayed in school 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 help. They lived hire free in a home owned by her mother and father, and so they acquired monetary assist from his mother and father and fellow lecturers.

“I started to steadily 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 sort of casual help community or a hustle.”

She had 4 youngsters and was separated from her husband when she grew to become 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 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 Nineteen Eighties. After incomes a level from Whittier Regulation Faculty, in Costa Mesa, Calif., in 1991, she practiced immigration and employment regulation.

“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 means of the Speculum.” “Hers was a type of activism the place ladies might use their heads, their arms and their hearts.”