Carollynn Aurilla Downer ( Chatham; October 9, 1933 – January 13, 2025) was 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.
Background
Downer was born in 1933 in Shawnee, 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.
Life and career 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.
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.Davis, Flora. (1991). Moving the Mountain The Women's Movement in America since 1960, New York: Simon Schuster. p. 232-233Morgen, Sandra.(2002)."Into Our Hands The Women's Health Movement in the United States, 1969-1990,"New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers University Press. pp.34,124 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."
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.Gordon, Linda.(2002)."The Moral Property of Women A History of Birth Control Politics in America,"Chicago:University of Illinois Press.p.325Love, Barbara J.(2006)."Feminist Who Changed America 1963-1975,"Urbana and Chicago:University of Illinois Press.p.123Marieskind, Helen I.(1980)."Women in the Health System,"St.Louis, Missouri:The C.V. Mosby Company.p.292Morgen, Sandra.(2002)."Into our Hands The Women's Health Movement in the United States, 1969-1990,"New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers University Press. p.7, 22-23, 34, 124Ruzek, Sheryl Burt.(1978)."The Women's Health Movement Feminist Alternatives to Medical Control,"New York:Praeger Publishers.p.53-58Sage-Femme Collective.(2008)."Natural Liberty Rediscovering Self-Induced Abortion Methods,"Las Vegas, Nevada:Sage-Femme! p.64 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.Morgen, Sandra.(2002)."Into Our Hands The Women's Health Movement in the United States, 1969-1990,"New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers University Press. p. 130Ruzek, Sheryl Burt.(1978)."The Women's Health Movement Feminist Alternatives to Medical Control,"New York:Praeger Publishers.p.144 Downer was later acquitted of all charges.
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.
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 Cassidy-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.
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.
Downer was promoting women's liberation, giving speaking presentations, and working on her next book in which she advances the belief that women's collective efforts to achieve their sexual and reproductive liberation is a fundamental strategy for social change. She was also working on the board of directors of the Feminist Women's Health Centers of California. This board operates eight Women's Health Specialist Clinics. She recently posted a video on YouTube about the history of her foundation and how she taught other women about the speculum abortion technique. She was also an immigration lawyer in the Los Angeles area.
Downer died on January 13, 2025, at a hospital in Glendale, California, after a heart attack two weeks prior. She was 91.
Self-help movement 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."
Self-help gynecology Self-Help gynecology was the basis of the movement's critique of the mystification of women's bodies and the monopoly of knowledge held by doctors. It was a consciousness-raising technique and involved the conceptualization of health and illness in a fundamentally different manner than the manner common at the time. Self-help gynecology was conceptualized as an ongoing, routine health care process. This had the effect of eliminating and/or minimizing the distinction between medical providers and experts, and the receivers and lay persons.
Downer and the practice of self-help gynecology had many critics, including those from within feminism. Some feminists felt shocked and offended at Downer and Rothman's self-examination presentations. Other feminists worried this practice would take attention away from the other efforts of the women's health movement, such as legislative and judicial reform. Some were concerned that the self-help groups themselves were merely an outlet for women to air their grievances of mainstream medical institutions and did not involve any real change. There were also those who worried that self-help gynecology would lead to an overreliance on it and would cause women to neglecting to visit their physician when experiencing serious conditions. To this, activists argued that self-help gynecology could be used in conjunction with mainstream medicine.
Significance to feminism Some scholars, such as Hannah Grace Dudley Shotwell, argue that self-help activists revolutionized women's healthcare by way of creating an entire system of alternative healthcare options. The movement gave activists the opportunity to gain "body-knowledge," which was self-representations of their own embodied experience. Activists were able to reconstruct negative cultural message of women's reproductive bodies, especially messages of female genitals and fluids that reinforced traditional sex roles. By understanding their own bodies through observation and the sharing of their bodily experiences, self-help activists, like Downer, combatted negative perceptions.
Self-Help Clinic One