Carol Downer Biography, Age, Height, Wife, Net Worth and Family

In 1992, she wrote A Woman’s Book of Choices with Rebecca Chalker, published by Seven Stories Press. She has also served on the board of directors of the National Abortion Federation. Downer’s book included instructions on how to practice early abortions more safely. The procedure requires the assistance of at least two experts. The book does not only tell readers to do abortions on their own, but it gives advice about when a woman should go to a medical practitioner to terminate early pregnancy.

From 1987 to 1991, Downer attended law school and worked for the Federation of FWHCs. Since then, she has practiced law, mostly in the area of disability rights. In 1981, she was the general editor of A New View of a Woman’s Body, published by Simon and Schuster, and she was an editor of a companion book, How to Stay Out of the Gynecologist’s Office, published by Women to Women Publication. In 1984, she and Francie Hornstein assisted Ginny Casside-Brinn, a Registered Nurse, in writing Woman-Centered Pregnancy and Birth, published by Cleis Press. But during the Reagan Administration, the anti-abortion movement grew, and the clinics were hit with protests. “The low point was 1985, when the clinic burned down, but we didn’t give up,” Downer said. Many believe the fire was started by protesters. So these women began mobile clinics located in vans, which did screenings in a safe and secure location.

Within 50 days of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, which ruled that women have a right to end their pregnancy, her group opened the Women’s Choice Clinic in Los Angeles and Orange County. Over the next two years, other Feminist Women’s Health Centers were established, forming part of the Federation of Feminist Women’s Health Center in 1975.

The result of this first meeting of the Self-Help Clinic was the development of the concept of menstrual extraction and the invention of the Del-Em kit by Lorraine Rothman. This provided women with a less traumatic abortion option than the use of a metal tool to scrape the inside of the uterus, which was predominately used at the time. Downer and Rothman travelled across the country and many Self-Help Clinics were formed. During this time, abortion, birth control and fertility information were not widely available to women. The menstrual extraction and vaginal self examinations that Downer pioneered with her team provided women with the means to learn about their bodies and take control of their reproduction. Barbara Ehrenreich described Downer and Rothman’s efforts as “legitimizing the notion that we have the right to know and decide about procedures…that affect our bodies and our lives.” In 1972 she also gave a notable speech to the American Psychological Association on September 5, 1972, in Hawaii, entitled “Covert Sex Discrimination Against Women as Medical Patients.”

In September 1972, police raided Self-Help Clinic one. One doctor, three uniformed policemen and several plainclothes investigators conducted what was later described as a “gynecological treasure hunt”. During their raid, they confiscated four trunk-loads of files, books, clothes, furniture, medical supplies, and medical equipment. They seized a fifty-foot extension cord, a plastic specula, syringes and tubes, different forms of birth control (i.e., IUDs, birth control pills, and diaphragms), Del-Ems, a pie tin, a measuring cup, and a carton of strawberry yogurt. The FWHC issued a press release that conveyed the absurdity of the raid. The press release reported the raid and noted that “police also attempted to confiscate a carton of strawberry yogurt, but were deterred by the strenuous objectives of one of the center staff members, who stated ‘you can’t have that ; it’s my breakfast!'” This led the feminist community to begin to refer to the raid as “The Great Yogurt Conspiracy.” the clinic later learned that they have been under surveillance for the past six months.

Downer began her activist career in the movement for civil rights and local politics in California during the 1960s. She became active in the women’s liberation movement in 1969, and she worked to try to make abortion available in Los Angeles, California under the liberalized abortion law. Downer began her work in the women’s health movement on the Abortion Task Force of NOW with Lana Clarke Phelan, author of The Abortion Handbook, who became her mentor. Downer and other women observed abortion procedures at Harvey Karman’s illegal abortion clinic on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Los Angeles to learn how to perform abortions themselves. While there, she took a vaginal speculum and figured out how to do a vaginal self-examination. After Downer and others formed the Los Angeles Abortion Task Force, they called a meeting on April 7, 1971 at a feminist book store to educate women about abortion and their bodies. Downer demonstrated the vaginal self-examination to the estimated two dozen women who attended. Downer’s group founded the Women’s Abortion Referral Service, the first of its kind to offer pregnancy screening. “Women came from all over for help”, Downer said.

She and Rothman were leaders of a group that founded the Feminist Women’s Health Center in Los Angeles in 1971. Equipped with vaginal speculums, they traveled the United States to share their information with women around the country. Downer and Rothman also promoted group meetings where they taught women how to self-administer cervical exams and provided them with information on a procedure called menstrual extraction. Downer and Rothman trained women how to suction out menstrual material on or near the time of the menstrual period; if the woman is pregnant, this constitutes a non-professional abortion. When they came back from their trip around the US, Downer and her followers started a women’s abortion referral service at their own clinic. In 1972, the police conducted a search of Downer’s clinic/health center and arrested her and Colleen Wilson for practicing medicine without a proper license. Called the Great Yogurt Conspiracy, they were using yogurt inter-vaginally to treat a woman’s yeast infection. Downer was later acquitted of all charges.

In 1971, Carol Downer and Lorraine Rothman founded “Self-Help Clinic One” in Los Angeles. Downer and Rothman came up with the idea at the Everywoman’s Bookstore, where women interested medical self-help met. During one meeting, Downer demonstrated self-examination technique by lifting her skirt, inserting a speculum into her vagina, and showing her cervix to the women at the meeting.

Before the 1970s, a woman’s gynecologist knew more about her body than she did. Downer wanted to change that, giving women the chance to see, understand, and take responsibility for their reproductive health, by making women aware of their rights as health care consumers. As such, Self-Help Clinic One and others like it, were more than just clinics – they were also political organizations.

The self-help movement started with the formation of self-help groups across the United States as a reaction to the experiences women had with gynecologists in the 1950s and 1960s. It a structural response to the absolute authority of doctors, the objectification of women’s bodies in health care, and the increasing dehumanization of the practice and field of medicine. The women in these groups believed that women and their bodily experiences were the best knowledge holders of women’s bodies. That was their central epistemological principle. Downer was one of the so-called “self-helpers.”

Carol Downer (born 1933 in Oklahoma) is an American feminist lawyer and non-fiction author who focused her career on abortion rights and women’s health around the world. She was involved in the creation of the self-help movement and the first self-help clinic in LA, which later became a model and inspiration for dozens of self-help clinics across the United States.

Downer was born in 1933 in Oklahoma, but was raised in Los Angeles, where she started her local political movements in East Los Angeles in the 1960s. She was not active in the women’s movement until 1963, when she had her first abortion after separating from her first husband, who was the father of her four children. She was inspired after watching a protest on the television held at the University of California, Los Angeles, about the lack of birth control services offered on the campus. After going through her experience with the painful abortion, in the early 1970s Downer began her quest to making abortions safer for other women. In 1969, she joined the LA Chapter of NOW’s Abortion Committee to learn about abortion and its history from Lana Phelan. This is where she met Harvey Karman. In 1970, many members of the LA feminist community supported Karman and his colleague, John Gwynn. Together they opened an illegal abortion clinic, the one in which Downer would refer women seeking abortion to. Downer soon began to feel dissatisfaction with the atmosphere of Karman and Gwynn’s clinic. Karman eventually agreed to let Downer observe his abortion method at the clinic, but Downer was always careful to say that Karman did not actually teach her how to do the abortions – he only allowed her to observe him perform it. Shortly after, Downer introduced menstrual extraction to other activists.