She opened clinics, worked to educate women about their reproductive health, and promoted an abortion technique she felt was safe enough for laypeople.
Carol Downer, a leader in the feminist women’s health movement who drew national fame for her role in a case known as the Great Yogurt Conspiracy — so named because she was charged with practicing medicine without a license for dispensing yogurt to treat a yeast infection — died on Jan. 13 in Glendale, Calif. She was 91.
Her death, in a 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 housewife and the mother of six in the late 1960s when she joined the women’s 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.
A psychologist named Harvey Karman had refined a technique for performing an abortion by suctioning the lining of a women’s 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.
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.
Lorraine Rothman, another member of NOW, refined Mr. Karman’s 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 — it was also a way to to regulate menstrual flow — as a kind of linguistic feint.
