Image: Carol Downer in 2017
Carol Downer first 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.
She 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. She opened clinics, worked to educate women about their reproductive health, and promoted an abortion technique she felt was safe enough for laypeople to use as well.
She took up the technique of suction abortion developed by Harvey Karman, which was safer, quicker and less painful than dilatation & curettage (D&C) and with others, learned to use it themselves. One of their group also refined it further into a kit, which included a flexible tube, a syringe and a jar. Doctors called it vacuum extraction. The women called it menstrual extraction — because it was also a way to regulate menstrual flow — and a way to hide the fact that it was also for abortion.
Early on she realised women didn’t know anything about their reproductive bodies so she taught self-examination, as the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective did later with the book Our Bodies, Ourselves. Downer and colleague Lorraine Rothman toured the US demonstrating self-examination and opening clinics for menstrual extraction, the first one in 1971 in Los Angeles. 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: “You can’t have that. That’s my lunch!”
Ms. Downer and a colleague, Carol Wilson, were charged with practicing medicine without a license. Ms. Downer’s crime was her yogurt treatment, and Ms. Wilson’s 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.
Ms. Downer decided to fight the yogurt charge. Using yogurt to treat a yeast infection, her defence claimed, was an old folk remedy, and in any case a yeast infection was so common that it did not require a doctor’s diagnosis. The jury agreed. The Great Yogurt Conspiracy helped popularize the women’s clinics, which were sprouting up all over the country.
Disagreements and criticism about the safety of self-help abortion began in response to their clinics. Sadly, those disagreements continue in relation to other newer self-help care and clinics to this day.
SOURCE: New York Times, by Penelope Green, 27 January 2025. Photo by Chris Greenspan.