Carol Downer, leader of the feminist women’s health movement who became nationally famous for her role in a case known as the Great Yogurt Conspiracy – so called because she was accused of practicing medicine without a license to distribute yogurt to cure an infection from yeast – died on January 13 in Glendale, California. He was 91 years old.
His death, in hospital, was confirmed by his daughter Angela Booth, who said he had had a heart attack a few weeks earlier.
Ms. Downer was a self-described housewife and mother of six in the late 1960s, when she joined the women’s movement and began working on the abortion committee of her local chapter of the National Organization for Women. She had had an illegal abortion years earlier and was determined to ensure that others did not suffer as she did.
A Psychologist 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 to teach doctors how to use it.
Ms. Downer and others thought 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 NOW member, refined Mr. Karman’s device into a kit she patented called the Del-Em, which included a hose, syringe and jar. Doctors called this technique a vacuum extraction. Women called it menstrual extraction – it was also a way to regulate menstrual flow – as a sort of linguistic feint.
Ms. Downer decided to explain its use to a group of women at a feminist bookstore in Venice Beach. As he later recalled, when he began describing the technique, which involved inserting the tube into the cervix, he realized he was losing his audience. They were horrified. This was the era of backroom abortions, when women died due to unsafe procedures, and here she was proposing what appeared to be an even more suspect practice.
So he changed tactics. She lay down on a table, lifted her skirt, inserted a speculum into her vagina and invited the audience to watch. The conversation veered from DIY abortions to an anatomy lesson.
The women had never seen the inside of their vaginas – in those days it was not the practice of male gynecologists to educate their patients about their own anatomy – and it was an “aha” moment for Ms Downer. Like many women across the country — particularly those in the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, which would later produce the self-help bible “Our Bodies, Ourselves” — she became determined to teach women about their reproductive health.
She and Mrs. Rothman toured 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 that women can control their own birth rate is fundamental. It goes right to the heart of the political situation for women,” Ms. Downer told the Los Angeles Times when Ms. Rothman died in 2007. “We both wanted to turn the whole thing on its head. 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, a clinic worker protested, “You can’t have it. This is my lunch!”
Ms. Downer and a colleague, Carol Wilson, were accused of practicing medicine without a license. Mrs Downer’s crime was the yoghurt treatment, while Mrs Wilson’s was applying a diaphragm to a woman. Ms Wilson was also accused of performing a menstrual extraction, conducting a pregnancy test and carrying out a pelvic examination. She pleaded guilty to the diaphragm charge and received a fine and probation.
Ms Downer has decided to fight the yoghurt charge. Using yogurt to treat a yeast infection, his defense argued, was an ancient folk remedy, and in any case a yeast infection was so common that it did not require a medical diagnosis. The panel agreed, and as Judith A. Houck, a professor of gender and women’s studies, recounted in “Looking Through the Speculum: Examining the Women’s Health Movement” (2024), the foreman sent Ms. Downer a note of appreciation.
“Carol – You are not a negative, you are truly superior!” he wrote. “Good luck!”
The Great Yogurt Conspiracy helped popularize women’s clinics, which were popping up across the country. While many in the women’s health movement were also working to eliminate gender bias in the medical profession, particularly as it relates to reproductive health, and to help those who needed it most access medical services, Ms. Downer was remained wary of what she believed was a patriarchal institution incapable of reform. She wasn’t convinced that change was possible.
She and others founded the nonprofit Federation of Feminist Women’s Health Centers and continued to research ways women could manage their fertility.
Yet 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 laypeople practicing the procedure.
“Carol Downer demonstrated 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 while I obviously had a similar distrust, I didn’t think it was safe or wise to put abortions in the hands of amateurs.”
In the years following the Roe v. Wade who guaranteed a woman’s constitutional right to abortion, vacuum extraction, the technique created by 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 doctor.
“There are risks and complications if it’s done incorrectly, particularly uterine perforation,” she said in an interview, “which 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 it 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, Ms. Downer and Rebecca Chalker, an abortion counselor, published “A Woman’s Book of Choices: Abortion, Menstruation, RU-486,” essentially a consumer’s guide to abortion.
Le Anne Schreiber, writing in the New York Times Book Review, called it “a hotline for the press in an age of government-ordered 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 try to impose so many restrictions, women reluctantly begin to take risks that others call choices.”
Carollyn Aurilla Chatham was born October 9, 1933, in Shawnee, Oklahoma, and grew up there and in Glendale. His father, Meade Chatham, was a gas company clerk; his mother, Nell (Stell) Chatham, was a secretary.
Carol studied sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, but dropped out her freshman year when she was pregnant with her first child. Her husband, Earle Wallace Brown, stayed in college and worked as a cab driver and then a special education teacher before contracting tuberculosis.
The family spent a year on social care, an experience that Ms 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 his parents and received financial help from his parents and fellow teachers.
“I began to gradually develop a radical political consciousness,” she said in an oral history conducted by the Veteran Feminists of America in 2021. “I learned mostly that no one survives on welfare without some sort of informal support network or a side hustle.”
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. Even though the procedure was performed by someone with experience and was medically safe, he did not receive any anesthesia, so if the location – an office with no furniture other than a table – had been searched by police, he might have stood up and escape.
Besides Mrs. Booth, also Mrs. Downer, who lived there Los Angeles, he 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 divorcing Mr. Brown, died in 2012. A daughter, Victoria Siegel, died in 2021.
Mrs. Downer returned to school in the late 1980s. After graduating from Whittier Law School, in Costa Mesa, California, in 1991, he practiced immigration and employment law.
“There is a line that connects Carol Downer to current reproductive rights and reproductive justice activists,” said Dr. Houck, the author of “Looking Through the Speculum.” “Hers was a form of activism in which women could use their heads, hands and hearts.”