![]() Equipped with vaginal speculums, they traveled the United States to share their information with women around the country. She and Rothman were leaders of a group that founded the Feminist Women's Health Center in Los Angeles in 1971. 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." 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. During this time, abortion, birth control and fertility information were not widely available to women. Downer and Rothman travelled across the country and many Self-Help Clinics were formed. 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. 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. "Women came from all over for help", Downer said. Downer's group founded the Women's Abortion Referral Service, the first of its kind to offer pregnancy screening. Downer demonstrated the vaginal self-examination to the estimated two dozen women who attended. After Downer and others formed the Los Angeles Abortion Task Force, they called a meeting on Apat a feminist book store to educate women about abortion and their bodies. While there, she took a vaginal speculum and figured out how to do a vaginal self-examination. 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. 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. 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. Life and career ĭowner began her activist career in the movement for civil rights and local politics in California during the 1960s. Shortly after, Downer introduced menstrual extraction to other activists. 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. Downer soon began to feel dissatisfaction with the atmosphere of Karman and Gwynn's clinic. Together they opened an illegal abortion clinic, the one in which Downer would refer women seeking abortion to. In 1970, many members of the LA feminist community supported Karman and his colleague, John Gwynn. In 1969, she joined the LA Chapter of NOW's Abortion Committee to learn about abortion and its history from Lana Phelan. After going through her experience with the painful abortion, in the early 1970s Downer began her quest to making abortions safer for other women. 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. 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. Background ĭowner 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 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. Manuel Award in 1994,Ĭarol 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. Immigration Lawyer, Author, Activist, Board of Directors of the Feminist Women's Health Centers of CaliforniaĬhristopher Tietze Humanitarian Award in 1998, Wiley W.
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