by Carol Downner, a leader in the feminist women’s health movement who attracted national fame for her role known as the great yogurt – mumwarming – so mentioned because she was accused of practicing drugs without a permit to grant yogurt to one Fungal infection to be treated – died on January 13 in Glendale, California she was 91.
Her death, in a hospital, was confirmed by her daughter Angela Booth, who said she had had a heart attack a few weeks earlier.
Mrs Downner was a self -described housewife and the mother of six in the late sixties when she became a member of the women’s movement and started working in the abortion committee of her local chapter of the National Organization for Women. Years earlier she had had an illegal abortion, and she was determined that others should not suffer like them.
A Psychologist named Harvey Karman had refined a technique for performing an abortion by sucking the lining of a women’s permanent mother. It was safer, faster and less painful than the more traditional dilatation and curettage technique, and he used it to perform abortions in the early term and to teach doctors how to use it.
Mrs Downner and others thought that the technology was 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 to a kit that she patented, called the Del-EM, including a flexible tube, a syringe and a pot. Doctors called the technology a vacuum extraction. The women called it a menstruation – extraction – it was also a way to regulate menstruation – as a kind of linguist Fint.
Mrs Downer wanted to explain to a group of women in a feminist bookstore in Venice Beach. As she remembered later, when she started to describe the technique, placing the tube in the cervix, she realized that she lost her audience. They were shocked. This was the era of abortions in the back room, when women died of unsafe procedures, and here she was what even more suspicious practice seemed to be.
So she changed from tactics. She lay down on a table, walked up her skirt, put a speculum in her vagina and invited her audience to watch. The conversation was based on do-it-yourself abortions to an anatomieles.
The women had never seen their own vaginas – it was not the habit of male gynecologists in those days to inform their patients about their own anatomy – and it was an “aha” moment for Mrs. Downer. Like many women throughout the country-especially those in the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, who would produce the self-help Bible ‘our bodies’, she was determined to learn women about their reproductive health.
They and Mrs. Rothman toured the country and demonstrated cervical exams and menstrual extraction. They made an impression on the 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 to the heart of the political situation of women, “Mrs Downer told the Los Angeles Times when Mrs. Rothman died in 2007. “We both wanted to turn the whole thing upside down. We wanted to equalize women.”
They opened their first clinic in Los Angeles in 1971. The following year the police fell over the place and, among other things, took a container with strawberry yogurt. As the story goes, a clinic employee protested: “You can’t have that. That’s my lunch! “
Mrs Downner and a colleague, Carol Wilson, were accused of practicing medicines without a license. Mrs Downer’s crime was her yogurt treatment and Mrs. Wilson was that she had mounted a woman with a diaphragm. Mrs. Wilson was also responsible for performing a menstrual period, performing pregnancy tests and giving a pelvic examination. She argued guilty of the aperture loading and received a fine and probationary period.
Mrs Downner decided to fight the yogurt. The use of yogurt to treat a fungal infection, claimed her defense, was an old folk remedy, and in any case a fungal infection was so common that it did not require a doctor’s diagnosis. The jury agreed, and as Judith A. Houck, professor for investigating gender and women, said in “looking through the speculum: research into the health movement of the women” (2024), the male foreman Mrs Downer sent a note of appreciation.
“Carol – You’re not Downer, you’re a real upper!” He wrote. “Success!”
The great yogurt -entry helped to make women’s clinics popular, which sprouts everywhere in the country. Although many in women’s health movement also worked to eliminate gender prejudices in the medical profession, in particular with regard to reproductive health, and to gain the most access to medical services, Mrs Downer remained suspicious of what She thought was that was a patriarchal institution that is unable to reform. She was not convinced that change was possible.
She and others continued to find the non -profit Federation of Feminist Women’s Health Centers, and she continued to investigate how women could manage their own fertility.
Yet many feminists, supporters of abortion rights and medical professionals were more than uncomfortable with the education of Mrs Downner and Mrs. Rothman; They were deep against the fact that lay people practiced the procedure.
“Carol Downer demonstrated a very reckless form of courage and resistance,” said Phyllis Chesler, the feminist psychologist, activist and author, in an interview. “I had a problem with the paranoia around the medical profession, and although of course I cherished a similar distrust, I didn’t think it was safe or wise to put abortions in the hands of amateurs.”
In the years after the row v. Wade decision, the constitutional law of a woman on an abortion, vacuum extraction, the technique devised by Mr. Karman, was the most common surgical procedure used by doctors to end a pregnancy . It’s still, said Dr. Louise P. King, university lecturer in obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive biology at the Harvard Medical School. The technology, she added, is safe when it is practiced by a medical professional.
“There are risks and complications if it is done wrong, especially uterine perforation,” she said in an interview, “that is what we train not to do. I am fully supported by those who want to take over control over their health and their lives , and I am sad to think that people may have to turn to these methods without the help of professionals, that they may not have access to these professionals ”.
In 1993, Mrs Downer and Rebecca Chalker, an abortion adviser, “A Woman’s Book of Choices: Abortion, Menstrual Extraction, RU-486”, essentially a consumer guide for abortion.
Le Anne Schreiber, who wrote in the New York Times Book Review, called it “a print hotline in a time of gag rules ordered by the government”, 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 try to impose so many limitations, women reluctantly start taking risks that other people call choices.”
Carolln Aurilla Chatham was born on October 9, 1933 in Shawnee, Okla., And grew up and in Glendale. Her father, Meade Chatham, was a servant in a gas company; Her mother, Nell (Stell) Chatham, was a secretary.
Carol studied sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, but stopped during her first year when she was pregnant with her first child. Her husband, Earle Wallace Brown, stayed at the university and worked as a Cab Driver and then as a special education teacher before giving tuberculosis.
The family spent a year on well -being, an experience that Mrs Downer later said she had politized her. Unlike most welfare recipients, she and her husband had extra support. They lived for free in a house that was owned by her parents and received financial help from his parents and colleague teachers.
“I gradually started to develop a radical political consciousness,” she said in an oral history of the experienced Feminists of America in 2021. “I learned that no one survives welfare without a kind of informal support network or a hustle and bustle.”
She had four children and was divorced 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 someone with experience and medically safe, she did not receive anesthesia so that if the place – an office without furniture next to a table – was attacked by the police, she could get up and run.
Next to Mrs. 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 various 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 went back to school in the late 1980s. After obtaining a diploma at the Whittier Law School, in Costa Mesa, California, in 1991, she practiced immigration and labor law.
“There is a transmission of Carol Downer to the current reproductive rights and reproductive justice activists,” said Dr. Houck, the author of “Looking through the speculum.” “Her was a form of activism in which women could use their heads, hands and hearts.”
