Carol Downer was a leader in the feminist women's health movement who drew national fame for her role in the case known as the Great Yogurt Conspiracy, in which yogurt was used to treat yeast infections. Named because he was accused of practicing medicine without a license. January 13th in Glendale, California. She was 91 years old.
Her death at the hospital was confirmed by her daughter Angela Booth. He said he had suffered a heart attack a few weeks ago.
Ms. Downer, a self-described housewife, was a mother of six when she joined the women's movement in the late 1960s and began working on the abortion committee of the local chapter of the National Organization for Women. Many years ago, she had an illegal abortion, so she decided that no one else should suffer like she did.
a A psychologist named Harvey Kalman had refined a technique for performing abortions by suctioning the lining of a woman's uterus. It wasn't safer, faster, faster, faster, faster, faster, faster, faster.
Downer and others believed the technique was so simple that it could be performed without medical training. They learned to practice the procedure on their own.
Lorraine Rothman, another member of Now, put Mr. Kalman's device into a sophisticated kit called Del-Em, which includes a flexible tube, a syringe, and a vial. Doctors called this technique vacuum extraction. Women called it menstrual extraction – it is also a way of regulating menstrual flow, as a kind of linguistic feint.
Downer aimed to explain its use to a group of women at a feminist bookstore in Venice Beach. As she later recalled, when she began explaining a technique that involved inserting a tube into the cervix, she realized she was losing her audience. they were scary. This was the era of backroom abortions, when women were dying from dangerous procedures, and here she was hawking what seemed to be even more questionable practices.
So she changed tactics. She lay on the table, hiked up her skirt, inserted a speculum into her vagina, and invited an audience. The conversation turned from do-it-yourself abortions to anatomy lessons.
Women had never seen it inside their vaginas. At that time, it was not the practice of male gynecologists to educate patients about their anatomy. Many women across the country, especially those at the Women's Health Book Collective in Boston, will continue to produce the self-help bible “Our Bodies, Ourselves.”
She and Ms. Rothman toured the country demonstrating cervical exams and menstrual extractions. They were so impressed by the eminent anthropologist Margaret Mead that she proclaimed it one of the most original ideas of the 20th century.
“The idea that women can control their birth rates is fundamental,” Downer told the Los Angeles Times when Rothman died in 2007. “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, workers at the clinic protested. “You can't have it. It's my lunch!”
Mr Downer and colleague Carol Wilson were charged with practicing medicine without a license. Downer's crime was her yogurt treatment, which Wilson said she placed on a woman with a diaphragm. Mr. Wilson was also charged with performing a menstrual extraction, performing a pregnancy test, and performing a pelvic exam. She pleaded guilty to the diaphragm charge and received a fine and probation.
Mr. Downer decides to fight the yogurt charge. Using yogurt to treat yeast infections is an old folk treatment that didn't require a doctor's diagnosis since yeast infections were so common anyway. The jury agreed, said Judith A. Hook, professor of gender and women's studies, in “Looking in the Mirror and Examining the Women's Health Movement” (2024). The male foreman sent Mr. Downer a note of thanks.
“Carol – you're not a downer, you're a real upper!” he wrote. “Good luck!”
The Great Yogurt Conspiracy helped popularize women's clinics that were sprouting across the country. Although much of the women's health movement also worked to eliminate gender bias in the medical profession, especially when it comes to reproductive health, and to make health services accessible to those who need them, Downer was concerned about what she felt was a patriarchy without reform. She was not convinced that change was possible.
She and others continued to found a nonprofit federation of feminist women's health centers and research ways women could take control of their fertility.
But many feminists, abortion rights supporters, and medical professionals were uncomfortable with Ms. Downer and Ms. Rothman's teachings. They were deeply opposed to having amateurs practice the procedure.
“Carol Downer demonstrated extraordinary courage and defiance,” activist and author Phyllis Chesler, a feminist psychologist, said in an interview. “I had a problem with the paranoia around medical professionals. Of course I had similar mistrust, but I didn't think it was safe or wise to put abortions in the hands of amateurs. ”
Roev. Years after the Wade decision guaranteed a woman's constitutional right to an abortion, vacuum extraction, a technique invented by Kallman, became the most common surgical procedure used by doctors to terminate pregnancies. It has become. Dr. Louise P. King, assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology, gynecology, and reproductive biology at Harvard Medical School, still does. She says the technique is safe when practiced by medical professionals.
“There are risks and complications if it goes wrong, especially if there is a uterine perforation,” she said in an interview. I am a complete supporter of people who want to take control of their health and life, and I think they should turn to these methods without the help of professionals who may not have access to these professionals. That's sad. ”
In 1993, abortion counselors Mr. Downer and Rebecca Chalker published The Woman's Choice Book: Abortion, Menstrual Extraction, and RU-486, essentially a consumer guide to abortion.
Lu Ann Schreiber, writing in the New York Times Book Review, called it “the print hotline of the era of government-mandated gag rules” and “warning signs.”
“When there are very few doctors performing abortions,” she wrote. “When a small number of medical schools teach the skills and when many states try to impose so many restrictions, women become reluctant to take the risks that others call choices.”
Carolyn Aurilla Chatham was born October 9, 1933, in Shawnee, Oklahoma, and raised in Glendale. Her father, Meade Chatham, was a clerk for a gas company. Her mother, Nell (Stell) Chatham, was a secretary.
Carol studied sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, but dropped out during her first year when she became pregnant with her first child. Her husband, Earl Wallace Brown, stayed in college and worked as a cab driver and special education teacher before contracting tuberculosis.
The family spent a year on welfare. It's an experience Downer later said politicized her. Unlike most welfare recipients, she and her husband received additional support. They lived rent-free in a house owned by her parents and received financial support from her parents and fellow teachers.
“I gradually began to develop a radical political consciousness,” she said in an oral history conducted by American Veteran Feminists in 2021.
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. Although the procedure was performed by an experienced person and was medically safe, she was not given anesthesia so she could get up and run if the police raided the unfurnished area next to the table. It's done.
In addition to Mr. Booth, Mr. Downer lived. 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. Daughter Victoria Siegel passed away in 2021.
Mr. Downer returned to school in the late 1980s. After receiving her degree from Whittier Law School in Costa Mesa, California in 1991, she practiced immigration and employment law.
“There's a throughline from Carol Downer to today's reproductive rights and reproductive justice activists,” said Dr. Houck, author of “Steal Sthos the Speculum.” “She was a type of activism that allowed women to use their heads, hands and hearts.”
