{"id":2219,"date":"2025-01-26T19:15:41","date_gmt":"2025-01-26T19:15:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/site.itshrt.com\/worldnews\/carol-downer-feminist-leader-in-womens-health-dies-at-91\/"},"modified":"2025-01-26T19:15:41","modified_gmt":"2025-01-26T19:15:41","slug":"carol-downer-feminist-leader-in-womens-health-dies-at-91","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/site.itshrt.com\/worldnews\/carol-downer-feminist-leader-in-womens-health-dies-at-91\/","title":{"rendered":"Carol Downer, Feminist Leader in Women\u2019s Health, Dies at 91"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <script async src=\"https:\/\/pagead2.googlesyndication.com\/pagead\/js\/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-6606220950177433\"\r\n     crossorigin=\"anonymous\"><\/script>\r\n<!-- ItShrt World News -->\r\n<ins class=\"adsbygoogle\"\r\n     style=\"display:block\"\r\n     data-ad-client=\"ca-pub-6606220950177433\"\r\n     data-ad-slot=\"1882483372\"\r\n     data-ad-format=\"auto\"\r\n     data-full-width-responsive=\"true\"><\/ins>\r\n<script>\r\n     (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});\r\n<\/script>\r\n<br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-0\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Carol Downer, a leader in the feminist women\u2019s health movement who drew national fame for her role in a case known as the Great Yogurt Conspiracy \u2014 so named because she was charged with practicing medicine without a license for dispensing yogurt to treat a yeast infection \u2014 died on Jan. 13 in Glendale, Calif. She was 91.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Her death, in a hospital, was confirmed by her daughter Angela Booth, who said she had suffered a heart attack a few weeks earlier.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Ms. Downer was a self-described housewife and the mother of six in the late 1960s when she joined the women\u2019s movement and began to work on 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 as she did.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">A<span class=\"css-8l6xbc evw5hdy0\">  <\/span>psychologist named <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.latimes.com\/archives\/la-xpm-2008-may-18-me-karman18-story.html\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Harvey Karman<\/a> had refined a technique for performing an abortion by suctioning the lining of a women\u2019s uterus. It was safer, quicker and less painful than the more traditional dilation and curettage technique, and he was using it to perform early-term abortions and teaching doctors how to use it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-1\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Ms. Downer and others thought the technique was so simple that it could be performed without medical training. They learned to practice the procedure themselves.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Lorraine Rothman, another member of NOW, refined Mr. Karman\u2019s device into a kit she patented called the Del-Em, which included a flexible tube, a syringe and a jar. Doctors called the technique a vacuum extraction. The women called it a menstrual extraction \u2014 it was also a way to to regulate menstrual flow \u2014 as a kind of linguistic feint.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-2\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Ms. Downer set out to explain 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 that she was losing her audience. They were horrified. This was the era of back-room abortions, when women were dying from unsafe procedures, and here she was hawking what seemed to be an even more suspect practice.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">So she changed tactics. She lay down on a table, hiked up her skirt, inserted a speculum into her vagina and invited her audience to look. The conversation veered from do-it-yourself abortions to an anatomy lesson.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-3\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">The women had never seen inside their own vaginas \u2014 it was not the habit of male gynecologists in those days to educate their patients about their own anatomy \u2014 and it was an \u201caha\u201d moment for Ms. Downer. Like many women around the country \u2014 notably those in the Boston Women\u2019s Health Book Collective, who would go on to produce the self-help bible <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2018\/04\/12\/style\/our-bodies-ourselves-book-publishing.html\" title=\"\">\u201cOur Bodies, Ourselves\u201d<\/a> \u2014 she became determined to teach women about their reproductive health.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">She and Ms. Rothman toured the country demonstrating cervical exams \u2014 and menstrual extraction. They so impressed the prominent anthropologist <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/archive.nytimes.com\/www.nytimes.com\/learning\/general\/onthisday\/bday\/1216.html\" title=\"\">Margaret Mead<\/a> that she declared the practice one of the most original ideas of the 20th century. <\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cThe idea of women being able to control their own birthrate is fundamental. It goes right to the heart of women\u2019s political situation,\u201d <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.latimes.com\/archives\/la-xpm-2007-oct-03-me-rothman3-story.html\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Ms. Downer told The Los Angeles Times when Ms. Rothman died in 2007.<\/a> \u201cWe both wanted to turn the whole thing upside down. We wanted to make women equal with men.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">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: \u201cYou can\u2019t have that. That\u2019s my lunch!\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Ms. Downer and a colleague, Carol Wilson, were charged with practicing medicine without a license. Ms. Downer\u2019s crime was her yogurt treatment, and Ms. Wilson\u2019s was that she had fitted a woman with a diaphragm. Ms. Wilson was also charged with performing a menstrual extraction, conducting pregnancy testing and giving a pelvic exam. She pleaded guilty to the diaphragm charge and received a fine and probation.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-4\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Ms. Downer decided to fight the yogurt charge. Using yogurt to treat a yeast infection, her defense claimed, was an old folk remedy, and in any case a yeast infection was so common that it did not require a doctor\u2019s diagnosis. <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1972\/12\/07\/archives\/coast-feminist-acquitted-of-illicit-medical-practice.html\" title=\"\">The jury agreed<\/a>, and as Judith A. Houck, <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/history.wisc.edu\/people\/houck-judith-a\/\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">a gender and women\u2019s studies professor<\/a>, recounted in \u201cLooking Through the Speculum: Examining the Women\u2019s Health Movement\u201d (2024), the male foreman sent Ms. Downer a note of appreciation.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cCarol \u2014 You\u2019re not a downer, you\u2019re a real upper!\u201d he wrote. \u201cGood Luck!\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">The Great Yogurt Conspiracy helped popularize women\u2019s clinics, which were sprouting up all over the country. Though many in the women\u2019s health movement were also working to eliminate gender bias in the medical profession, particularly with regard to reproductive health, and to help those who needed it most gain access to medical services, Ms. Downer remained leery of what she felt was a patriarchal institution incapable of reform. She was not convinced that change was possible.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">She and others went on to found the nonprofit Federation of Feminist Women\u2019s Health Centers, and she continued to research the ways women could manage their own fertility.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Yet many feminists, abortion rights supporters and medical professionals were more than uncomfortable with Ms. Downer and Ms. Rothman\u2019s teaching; they were deeply opposed to having laypeople practice the procedure.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cCarol Downer demonstrated a very reckless form of courage and defiance,\u201d Phyllis Chesler, the feminist psychologist, activist and author, said in an interview. \u201cI had a problem with the paranoia around the medical profession, and although I of course harbored a similar distrust, I didn\u2019t think it was safe or wise to put abortions in the hands of amateurs.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-5\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">In the years after the Roe v. Wade decision guaranteed a woman\u2019s constitutional right to an abortion, vacuum extraction, the technique devised by Mr. Karman, became the most common surgical procedure used by doctors to end a pregnancy. It still is, said Dr. Louise P. King, assistant professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive biology at Harvard Medical School. The technique, she added, is safe when practiced by a medical professional.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cThere are risks and complications if it\u2019s done wrong, notably uterine perforation,\u201d she said in an interview, \u201cwhich is what we train not to do. I\u2019m fully in support of those who want to take control of their health and their lives, and it saddens me to think people might have to turn to these methods without the help of professionals, that they might not have access to these professionals.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">In 1993, Ms. Downer and Rebecca Chalker, an abortion counselor, published \u201cA Woman\u2019s Book of Choices: Abortion, Menstrual Extraction, RU-486,\u201d essentially a consumer guide to abortion. <\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Le Anne Schreiber, <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1993\/01\/17\/books\/what-kind-of-abortions-do-we-want.html\" title=\"\">writing in The New York Times Book Review<\/a>, called it \u201ca print hotline in a time of government-ordered gag rules\u201d as well as \u201ca warning sign.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-6\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cWhen so few doctors perform abortions,&#8221; she wrote, \u201cwhen 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-7\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Carollyn Aurilla Chatham was born on Oct. 9, 1933, in Shawnee, Okla., and grew up there and in Glendale. Her father, Meade Chatham, was a clerk in a gas company; her mother, Nell (Stell) Chatham, was a secretary.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">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 contracting tuberculosis.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">The family spent a year on welfare, an experience that Ms. Downer later said politicized her. Unlike most welfare recipients, she and her husband had additional support. They lived rent free in a house owned by her parents, and they received financial help from his parents and fellow teachers.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cI began to gradually develop a radical political consciousness,\u201d <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/veteranfeministsofamerica.org\/interview-carol-downer\/\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">she said in an oral history conducted by the Veteran Feminists of America in 2021<\/a>. \u201cI mainly learned that no one survives on welfare without some kind of informal support network or a hustle.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-8\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">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. While the procedure was performed by a someone with experience and was medically safe, she received no anesthesia so that if the place \u2014 an office with no furniture beside a table \u2014 was raided by the police, she could get up and run.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">In addition to Ms. Booth, Ms. Downer, who lived in<span class=\"css-8l6xbc evw5hdy0\">  <\/span>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.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Ms. Downer went back to school in the late 1980s. After earning a degree from Whittier Law School, in Costa Mesa, Calif., in 1991, she practiced immigration and employment law.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cThere\u2019s a through line from Carol Downer to the current reproductive rights and reproductive justice activists,\u201d said Dr. Houck, the author of \u201cLooking Through the Speculum.\u201d \u201cHers was a form of activism where women could use their heads, their hands and their hearts.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/pagead2.googlesyndication.com\/pagead\/js\/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-6606220950177433\"\r\n     crossorigin=\"anonymous\"><\/script>\r\n<!-- ItShrt World News -->\r\n<ins class=\"adsbygoogle\"\r\n     style=\"display:block\"\r\n     data-ad-client=\"ca-pub-6606220950177433\"\r\n     data-ad-slot=\"1882483372\"\r\n     data-ad-format=\"auto\"\r\n     data-full-width-responsive=\"true\"><\/ins>\r\n<script>\r\n     (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});\r\n<\/script>\r\n<br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/01\/26\/health\/carol-downer-dead.html\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Carol Downer, a leader in the feminist women\u2019s health movement who drew national fame for her role in a case<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2220,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[552,549,441,548,554,553,551,555,556,550,150],"class_list":["post-2219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health-2","tag-birth-control-and-family-planning","tag-carol-1933-2025","tag-deaths-obituaries","tag-downer","tag-federation-of-feminist-womens-health-centers","tag-feminist-womens-health-center","tag-medicine-and-health","tag-our-bodies","tag-ourselves-book","tag-women-and-girls","tag-womens-rights"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v24.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Carol Downer, Feminist Leader in Women\u2019s Health, Dies at 91 - World News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, 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