Carol Downer, a leader in the feminist women’s health movement who gained 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 for the yeast infection cure – died Jan. 13 in Glendale, Calif. He was 91.
Her death, in 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 homemaker and mother of six in the late 1960s when she joined the women’s movement and began working on the abortion committee of the local chapter of the National Organization for Women. Years ago, she had an illegal abortion and was determined not to let others suffer the way she did.
A A psychologist named Harvey Karman had perfected 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 curettage technique, and he used it to perform early abortions and teach doctors how to use it.
Ms. Downer and others believed the technique was so simple that it could be performed without medical training. They learned to practice the process itself.
Lorraine Rothman, another Now member, refines Mr. Karman in a patented kit called Del-EM, which included a hose, a syringe and a jar. Doctors called the vacuum extraction technique. Women called it menstrual mining – it was also a way to regulate menstrual flows – as a kind of linguistic moon.
Ms. Downer began explaining its use to a group of women at a feminist bookstore in Venice Beach. As she later recalled, when she began to describe the technique, which involved inserting the tube into the cervix, she realized she had lost her audience. They were terrified. This was the era of back-room abortions, when women died from unsafe procedures, and here he was bringing out what appeared to be an even more dubious practice.
So he changed tactics. Lying on a table, she climbed up her skirt, inserted a speculum into her vagina and invited her audience to look. The conversation ran from do-it-yourself abortions to an anatomy lesson.
The women had never seen inside their own vaginas – it was not the custom of male gynecologists at the time to educate their patients about their own anatomy – and it was an “AHA” moment for Ms Downer. Like many women across the country—notably those at Boston Women’s Book, 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 traveled the country demonstrating cervical exams – and menstrual extraction. They so impressed the eminent anthropologist Margaret Mead that she declared the practice one of the most original ideas of the 20th century.
“The idea of women being able to control their own birthday is fundamental. It goes right to the heart of the political situation of women,” said Ms. Downer told the Los Angeles Times when Ms. Rothman died in 2007. “They both wanted to turn the whole thing upside down. We wanted to make women equal to men.”
They opened their first clinic in Los Angeles in 1971. The next year, the police raided the place and confiscated, among other things, a tub of strawberry yogurt. As the story goes, a clinic worker protested, “You can’t have that. That’s my lunch!”
Ms. Downer and a colleague, Carol Wilson, were charged with practicing medicine without a license. Ms. Downer’s crime was her yogurt cure and Ms. Wilson’s was that she had fitted a woman with a diaphragm. Ms Wilson was also accused of performing menstrual extraction, conducting pregnancy tests and giving pelvic exams. He pleaded guilty to the diaphragm debt and received a fine and probation.
Ms. Downer decided to fight yogurt. Using yogurt to treat a yeast infection, her defense argued, was an old 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, professor of gender and women, reported in “Looking Through the Speculum: Examining the Women’s Health Movement” (2024)
“Carol – you’re not a downer, you’re a real top!” he wrote “Good luck!”
The great yogurt conspiracy helped popularize women’s clinics, which sprang up across the country. Although many in the women’s health movement were also working to eliminate gender bias in the medical profession, particularly in relation to reproductive health, and to help those who needed it most to access medical services, Ms Downer remained disaffected. which he felt was a patriarchal institution incapable of reform. She was not convinced that change was possible.
She and the others went on to found the nonprofit Federation of Feminist Women’s Health Centers, and she continued to research ways women could manage their own fertility.
However, many feminists, abortion rights advocates, and medical professionals were more than uncomfortable with Ms. Downer and Ms. Rothman’s teaching. They were deeply opposed to the exercise of lay practice the procedure.
“Carol Downer showed a very reckless form of courage and defiance,” Phyllis Chesler, a feminist psychologist, activist and author, said in an interview. “I had a problem with the paranoia surrounding the medical profession, and although of course I have a similar mistrust, I didn’t think it was safe or wise to put abortions in the hands of amateurs.”
In the years since Roe v. Wade guarantees a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion, vacuum extraction, the technique invented by Mr. Karman, became 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, he added, is safe when practiced by a medical professional.
“There are risks and complications if it’s done wrong, not least uterine piercing,” he said in an interview, “which is what we’re trained not to do. I’m fully in support of those who want to take control of their health and their lives and it saddens me to think that people may have to turn to these methods without the help of professionals so that they do not have access to these professionals.”
In 1993, Ms. Downer and Rebecca Chalker, an abortion consultant, published “A Woman’s Choice Book: Abortion, Menstrual Extraction, RU-486,” essentially a consumer guide to abortion.
Le Anne Schreiber, writing in her New York Times review of the book, called it “a printing hotline in an age of government GAG rules” 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 seek 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 an employee of a natural 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 was pregnant with her first child. Her husband, Earle Wallace Brown, stayed in college and worked as a cabdriver and then a special education teacher before catching tuberculosis.
The family spent a year on welfare, an experience Ms. Downer later said 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 assistance from his parents and colleagues.
“I began to gradually develop a radical political consciousness,” she said in an oral history held by Veteran Feminists of America in 2021. “What I learned above all is that no one survives on welfare without some kind of informal support network or a hustle.”
She had four children and 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, he did not receive anesthesia so that if the place – an office with no furniture next to a table – was invaded by the police, he could get up and run.
In addition to Ms. Booth, Mrs. Downer, who 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. A daughter, Victoria Siegel, died in 2021.
Ms. Downer returned to school in the late 1980s. After earning a degree from Whittier Law School, Costa Mesa, California, in 1991, she practiced immigration and employment law.
“There is a line through Carol Downer to today’s reproductive rights and reproductive justice activists,” said Dr. Houck, author of “Looking Through the Speculum.” “Hers was a form of activism where women could use their heads, their hands and their hearts.”
