Carol Downer, a frontrunner within the feminist ladies’s well being motion who drew nationwide fame for her function in a case often known as the Nice Yogurt Conspiracy — so named as a result of she was charged with training drugs and not using a license for allotting yogurt to deal with a yeast an infection — died on Jan. 13 in Glendale, Calif. She was 91.

Her loss of life, in a hospital, was confirmed by her daughter Angela Sales space, who stated she had suffered a coronary heart assault a couple of weeks earlier.

Ms. Downer was a self-described housewife and the mom of six within the late Nineteen Sixties when she joined the ladies’s motion and commenced to work on the abortion committee of her native chapter of the Nationwide Group for Ladies. Years earlier, she had had an unlawful abortion, and he or she was decided that others mustn’t undergo as she did.

A psychologist named Harvey Karman had refined a way for performing an abortion by suctioning the liner of a ladies’s uterus. It was safer, faster and fewer painful than the extra conventional dilation and curettage method, and he was utilizing it to carry out early-term abortions and educating docs the way to use it.

Ms. Downer and others thought the method was so easy that it may very well be carried out with out medical coaching. They discovered to observe the process themselves.

Lorraine Rothman, one other member of NOW, refined Mr. Karman’s system right into a equipment she patented referred to as the Del-Em, which included a versatile tube, a syringe and a jar. Docs referred to as the method a vacuum extraction. The ladies referred to as it a menstrual extraction — it was additionally a technique to to manage menstrual movement — as a type of linguistic feint.

Ms. Downer got down to clarify its use to a gaggle of girls at a feminist bookstore in Venice Seaside. As she later recalled, when she started to explain the method, which concerned inserting the tube into the cervix, she realized that she was dropping her viewers. They had been horrified. This was the period of back-room abortions, when ladies had been dying from unsafe procedures, and right here she was hawking what appeared to be an much more suspect observe.

So she modified techniques. She lay down on a desk, hiked up her skirt, inserted a speculum into her vagina and invited her viewers to look. The dialog veered from do-it-yourself abortions to an anatomy lesson.

The ladies had by no means seen inside their very own vaginas — it was not the behavior of male gynecologists in these days to coach their sufferers about their very own anatomy — and it was an “aha” second for Ms. Downer. Like many ladies across the nation — notably these within the Boston Ladies’s Well being Ebook Collective, who would go on to supply the self-help bible “Our Our bodies, Ourselves” — she turned decided to show ladies about their reproductive well being.

She and Ms. Rothman toured the nation demonstrating cervical exams — and menstrual extraction. They so impressed the distinguished anthropologist Margaret Mead that she declared the observe one of the crucial unique concepts of the twentieth century.

“The thought of girls with the ability to management their very own birthrate is prime. It goes proper to the guts of girls’s political scenario,” Ms. Downer informed The Los Angeles Occasions when Ms. Rothman died in 2007. “We each needed to show the entire thing the other way up. We needed to make ladies equal with males.”

They opened their first clinic in Los Angeles in 1971. The subsequent 12 months, the police raided the place and confiscated, amongst different issues, a bathtub of strawberry yogurt. Because the story goes, a clinic employee protested: “You possibly can’t have that. That’s my lunch!”

Ms. Downer and a colleague, Carol Wilson, had been charged with training drugs and not using a license. Ms. Downer’s crime was her yogurt therapy, and Ms. Wilson’s was that she had fitted a girl with a diaphragm. Ms. Wilson was additionally charged with performing a menstrual extraction, conducting being pregnant testing and giving a pelvic examination. She pleaded responsible to the diaphragm cost and acquired a high-quality and probation.

Ms. Downer determined to combat the yogurt cost. Utilizing yogurt to deal with a yeast an infection, her protection claimed, was an outdated people treatment, and in any case a yeast an infection was so widespread that it didn’t require a physician’s analysis. The jury agreed, and as Judith A. Houck, a gender and girls’s research professor, recounted in “Wanting By means of the Speculum: Inspecting the Ladies’s Well being Motion” (2024), the male foreman despatched Ms. Downer a notice of appreciation.

“Carol — You’re not a downer, you’re an actual higher!” he wrote. “Good Luck!”

The Nice Yogurt Conspiracy helped popularize ladies’s clinics, which had been sprouting up everywhere in the nation. Although many within the ladies’s well being motion had been additionally working to get rid of gender bias within the medical occupation, significantly with regard to reproductive well being, and to assist those that wanted it most achieve entry to medical companies, Ms. Downer remained leery of what she felt was a patriarchal establishment incapable of reform. She was not satisfied that change was doable.

She and others went on to discovered the nonprofit Federation of Feminist Ladies’s Well being Facilities, and he or she continued to analysis the methods ladies may handle their very own fertility.

But many feminists, abortion rights supporters and medical professionals had been greater than uncomfortable with Ms. Downer and Ms. Rothman’s educating; they had been deeply against having laypeople observe the process.

“Carol Downer demonstrated a really reckless type of braveness and defiance,” Phyllis Chesler, the feminist psychologist, activist and writer, stated in an interview. “I had an issue with the paranoia across the medical occupation, and though I after all harbored an analogous mistrust, I didn’t assume it was protected or smart to place abortions within the arms of amateurs.”

Within the years after the Roe v. Wade determination assured a girl’s constitutional proper to an abortion, vacuum extraction, the method devised by Mr. Karman, turned the commonest surgical process utilized by docs to finish a being pregnant. It nonetheless is, stated Dr. Louise P. King, assistant professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive biology at Harvard Medical Faculty. The method, she added, is protected when practiced by a medical skilled.

“There are dangers and problems if it’s performed fallacious, notably uterine perforation,” she stated in an interview, “which is what we practice to not do. I’m absolutely in assist of those that need to take management of their well being and their lives, and it saddens me to assume individuals may need to show to those strategies with out the assistance of execs, that they may not have entry to those professionals.”

In 1993, Ms. Downer and Rebecca Chalker, an abortion counselor, revealed “A Lady’s Ebook of Selections: Abortion, Menstrual Extraction, RU-486,” primarily a client information to abortion.

Le Anne Schreiber, writing in The New York Occasions Ebook Overview, referred to as it “a print hotline in a time of government-ordered gag guidelines” in addition to “a warning signal.”

“When so few docs carry out abortions,” she wrote, “when so few medical faculties train the methods, when so many states search to impose so many restrictions, ladies reluctantly start to take dangers that different individuals name selections.”

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 fuel firm; her mom, Nell (Stell) Chatham, was a secretary.

Carol studied sociology on the College of California, Los Angeles, however dropped out throughout her first 12 months when she was pregnant together with her first youngster. Her husband, Earle Wallace Brown, stayed in school and labored as a cabdriver after which a special-education trainer earlier than contracting tuberculosis.

The household spent a 12 months on welfare, an expertise that Ms. Downer later stated politicized her. Not like most welfare recipients, she and her husband had further assist. They lived hire free in a home owned by her mother and father, and so they acquired monetary assist from his mother and father and fellow academics.

“I started to step by step develop a radical political consciousness,” she stated in an oral historical past performed by the Veteran Feminists of America in 2021. “I primarily discovered that nobody survives on welfare with out some type of casual assist community or a hustle.”

She had 4 youngsters and was separated from her husband when she turned pregnant, and determined to have an abortion. It was 1962, 5 years earlier than abortion was legalized in California and 11 years earlier than Roe. Whereas the process was carried out by somebody with expertise and was medically protected, she acquired no anesthesia in order that if the place — an workplace with no furnishings beside a desk — was raided by the police, she may stand up and run.

Along with Ms. Sales space, Ms. Downer, who lived in Los Angeles, is survived by two different daughters, Laura Brown and Shelby Coleman; two sons, David Brown and Frank Downer Jr.; eight grandchildren; and several other 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.

Ms. Downer went again to highschool within the late Nineteen Eighties. After incomes a level from Whittier Legislation Faculty, in Costa Mesa, Calif., in 1991, she practiced immigration and employment legislation.

“There’s a by way of line from Carol Downer to the present reproductive rights and reproductive justice activists,” stated Dr. Houck, the writer of “Wanting By means of the Speculum.” “Hers was a type of activism the place ladies may use their heads, their arms and their hearts.”