Carol Downer, leader of the feminist movement for women who became famous at national level for his role in a case known as Great Yogurt Conspiracy – so called because he was accused of practicing medicine without a license to distribute yogurt to treat an infection As a yeast – she died on January 13 in Glendale, California. He was 91 years old.
His death in the hospital was confirmed by his daughter Angela Booth, who said he had a heart attack a few weeks earlier.
Mrs. Downer self -refined herself a housewife and mother of six children in the late 1960s, when she joined the movement of women and began working in the abortion committee of her local section of the National Organization for Women. Years earlier he had had an illegal abortion and was determined to ensure that others did not suffer like her.
A The psychologist Harvey Karman had perfected a technique to perform an abortion by sucking the cherry up of a woman’s uterus. He was safer, faster and less painful than the more traditional technique of dilation and scraping, and used it to perform early abortions and to teach doctors how to use it.
Mrs. Downer and others thought that the technique was so simple that they could be performed without medical training. They learned to practice the procedure alone.
Lorraine Rothman, another member of Now, has perfected the device of Mr. Karman in a patented kit called Del-EM, which included a flexible tube, a syringe and a jar. The doctors called this technique a vacuum extraction. Women called her menstrual extraction – it was also a way to regulate menstrual flow – as a sort of fake linguistic.
Mrs. Downer decided to explain its use to a group of women in a feminist library in Venice Beach. As he later remembered, when he began to describe the technique, which provided for the insertion of the tube in the cervix, he realized that he was losing his audience. They were horrified. This was the era of abortions behind the scenes, when women died due to unsafe procedures, and here it was that it proposed what seemed to be an even more suspicious practice.
So he changed tactics. He lay down on a table, raised his skirt, inserted a speculum in his vagina and invited the audience to look at. The conversation virmed from do-it-yourself abortions to an anatomy lesson.
The women had never seen the interior of their vaginas – at that time it was not the habit of men’s gynecologists to educate their patients on their anatomy – and it was a “aha” moment for the lady down. Like many women across the country – in particular those of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, which would then have produced the self -help Bible “Our Bodies, Ourselves” – became determined to teach women their reproductive health.
She and Mrs. Rothman shot the country by demonstrating cervical tests and menstrual extraction. The eminent anthropologist Margaret Mead imposed so much impressive, who declared the practice one of the most original ideas of the twentieth century.
“The idea that women can control their birth rate is fundamental. He goes straight to the heart of the political situation of women, “said Mrs. Downer at the Los Angeles Times when Mrs. Rothman died in 2007.” We both wanted to turn the whole affair. We wanted to make women equal to men. “
They opened their first clinic in Los Angeles in 1971. The following year the police broke into the club and confiscated, among other things, a jar of strawberry yogurt. According to history, an operator of the clinic protested: “You can’t have it. This is my lunch! “
Mrs. Downer and a colleague, Carol Wilson, were accused of practicing the medical profession without license. Mrs. Downer’s crime was the treatment with yogurt, while that of Mrs. Wilson was to have applied a diaphragm to a woman. Mrs. Wilson was also accused of having performed a menstrual extraction, of having conducted a pregnancy test and having carried out a pelvic examination. He declared himself guilty of the accusation on the diaphragm and received a fine and supervised freedom.
Mrs. Downer decided to fight the accusation on yogurt. Using yogurt to treat a yeast infection, supported its defense, was an ancient popular remedy, and in any case a yeast infection was so common that it did not require medical diagnosis. The jury agreed and, as Judith A. Houck, teacher of gender studies and women said, in “Looking through the speculum: Examing the Women’s Health Movement” (2024), the head of the head of the appreciation.
“Carol – You are not a negative aspect, you are really superior!” He wrote. “Good luck!”
The great conspiracy of the yogurt contributed to making female clinics popular, who were popping up across the country. Although many in the health movement of women were also working to eliminate gender prejudices in the medical profession, in particular as regards reproductive health, and to help those who needed more to access medical services, Mrs. Downer is remained wary on what he believed was a patriarchal institution unable to reform. He was not convinced that the change was possible.
She and others founded the non-profit federation of the feminist female health centers and continued to search for the ways in which women could manage their fertility.
Yet many feminists, supporters of the right to abortion and medical professionals were more than uncomfortable with the teaching of Mrs. Downer and Mrs. Rothman; They were profoundly contrary to the fact that laity practiced the procedure.
“Carol Downer has shown a very reckless form of courage and challenge,” Phyllis Chesler, psychologist, activist and feminist author, said in an interview. “I had a problem with the paranoia surrounding the medical profession and, although obviously I had such a distrust, I didn’t think it was safe or wise to put abortions in the hands of amateurs.”
In the years following the decision ROE v. Wade who guaranteed the constitutional law of the woman to abortion, the extraction with emptiness, the technique conceived by Karman, became the most common surgical procedure used by doctors to stop pregnancy. It is still, said Dr. Louise P. King, assistant professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive biology at the Harvard Medical School. The technique, he added, is sure if practiced by a doctor.
“There are risks and complications if it is done wrongly, in particular uterine perforation,” he said in an interview, “that it is what we train not to do. I am fully in support of those who want to take control of their health and their lives, and saddens me to think that people may have to resort to these methods without the help of professionals, who may not have access to these professionals. “
In 1993, Mrs. Downer and Rebecca Chalker, a consultant on abortion, published “The book of a woman’s choices: abortion, menstrual extraction, RU-486”, essentially a guide for consumers on abortion.
The Anne Schreiber, writing in the New York Times Book Review, called it “a hotline for the press in an era of Bavage rules ordered by the government” as well as “a warning sign”.
“When so few doctors practice abortions,” he wrote, “when few medical schools teach techniques, when so many states try to impose so many restrictions, women with reluctance begin to take risks that others call choices”.
Carollyn Aurilla Chatham was born on 9 October 1933 in Shawnee, Oklahoma, and grew up there and to Glendale. His father, Meade Chatham, was an employee in a gas company; His mother, in the (stone) Chatham, was a secretary.
Carol studied sociology at the University of California, in Los Angeles, but abandoned her studies during the first year when she was pregnant with her first child. Her husband, Earle Wallace Brown, stayed on college and worked as a taxi driver and then special education teacher before contracting tuberculosis.
The family spent a year in social assistance, an experience that Mrs. Downer later said politicized. Unlike most beneficiaries of social assistance, she and her husband have received additional support. They lived for free in a house owned by his parents and received financial help from his parents and teacher colleagues.
“I started to gradually develop a radical political consciousness,” he said in an oral history conducted by the Veteran Feminists of America in 2021. “I mainly learned that nobody survives with welfare without a sort of informal support network or a bustle”.
He had four children and was separated from her husband when she was pregnant and decided to abort. It was 1962, five years before the abortion was legalized in California and 11 years before Roe. Even if the procedure was performed by a person with experience and was sure from a medical point of view, he received no anesthesia, so if the place – an office without furniture next to a table – had been searched by the police, he could have risen And run away.
In addition to Mrs. Booth, also Mrs. Downer, who lived there Los Angeles leaves two other daughters, Laura Brown and Shelby Coleman; Two children, David Brown and Frank Downer Jr.; eight grandchildren; And several prones. Her second husband, Frank Downer, who he married in 1965 after the divorce from Mr. Brown, died in 2012. A daughter, Victoria Siegel, died in 2021.
Mrs. Downer returned to school in the late 1980s. After graduating from the Whittier Law School, in Costa Mesa, California, in 1991, he practiced immigration and work right.
“There is a line that connects Carol Downer to current activists for reproductive rights and reproductive justice,” said Dr. Houck, the author of “Looking through the Speculum”. “His was a form of activism in which women could use their heads, hands and heart”.