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Carol Downer (born 1933 in Oklahoma) is an American feminist lawyer and non-fiction author who has 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-clinic clinics across the United States.

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
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 who practiced medical self-help would meet. During the meeting, to demonstrate a self-examination technique, Downer lifted her skirt, inserted a speculum into her vagina, and showed her cervix to the women at the meeting.

The clinic began in a single, back room in the Women's Center on South Crenshaw Boulevard and later, clinic moved to a house in the same area so as to be accessible to women who needed the services. Downer explained that the clinic's main goal was to "take women's medicine back into our own hands. The strategy [was] to take back the power over power over our own bodies, both everyday types of control which information and self-knowledge gives [sic] us, and we also want to acquire special skills and knowledge which will allow us collectively to independently provide our own health care." The center eventually became a symbol of legalize abortion and had an active part in the public dialogue of abortion rights.

It served as a blueprint for the format and ideology of other self-help clinics established in other parts of California, Oregon, Washington, Florida, and Georgia. These centers led to the foundation of a decentralized coalition called the "Federation of Feminist Women's Health Centers" (FWHC). Within the coalition, they would share materials, collectively wrote severely books, and would meet in LA for political education events. The clinic ultimately closed in 1984.

Principles
With the clinic, Downer wanted to educate women on their bodies. The first way to do that was to make women aware of their rights as consumers of existing health services. As such, Self-Help Clinic One, and others like it, were more than just a clinic, they were also a political organization. They operated as a base for political activity.

Although controversial among feminists, Downer believed in the concept of organizational structure. Running a clinic required a bureaucracy, but to avoid the typical bureaucratical pitfalls of regular health centers, Downer and Rothman's clinic had an open structure that invited the maximum participation when making clinic policy. She wanted to make the structure of the clinic work for the staff and patients - not the other way around, and so, the clinic had collective control over the workplace and had no outside board of directors or separate management structure.

Additionally, Downer and Rothman wanted to avoid the layout of traditional abortion clinics where the patient would follow a standardized route into and through the clinic. Instead, they had the patients sit at different stations with one another, giving them to opportunity to speak amongst themselves. Staff would provide food and beverages if the wait was long. After the abortion performed, the women would return back to the waiting so the others could see that she was fine. This created a loop of peer counselling amongst patients as soon as they entered the clinic. This layout empowered women to ask questions, observe how other women were doing, and support one another. Downer wanted to ensure the most comfortable and supportive environment - different from the bare environment at a typical medical facility, which were run mainly by men. The environment in the clinic itself had decorations on the walls, rugs, and plants, providing a "women's touch" to the atmosphere, and comfortable chairs arranged in a circle to facilitate conversations. On the ceiling over top of the examination table, there was a landscape scene to create a calming atmosphere for the women during procedures

Services
Self-Help Clinic One, and other feminist women's health centers like it, offered two main types of services. First, they offered abortions. Within two weeks of the Roe v. Wade decision, the Women's Choice Clinic opened and they began offering abortions. Doctors would perform therapeutic abortions up to 10 weeks after conception. The staff counseled the women before and after the abortion, and would accompany them into the procedure room to help walk them through the process and to offer emotional support. In addition to this, free pregnancy screening and information on birth control. Although, due to the extreme legal vulnerability of abortion access, the staff were care to follow the letter of the law and thus, doctors always performed the abortions, accompanied by two laywomen health workers.

The second kind of service they provided was "well-women" gynecology care. This service was more open to experimentation than the abortion service. With this service, women learnt how to perform vaginal self-examinations and other basic gynecological procedures in a group setting. Since this service was open to experimentation, women had two choices for their appointment type: they could either be examined by a women gynecologist and women lay worker who would show them how to do self-examination techniques, or they could have an appointment scheduled with several other women and, in addition to being treated by a doctor, they could also watch the examination and treatment of other women.

The Great Yogurt Conspiracy
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.

Arrest and Trial
Carol Downer and a staff member, Colleen Wilson, were arrested on the grounds of practicing medicine without a license. The police charged Wilson for giving out birth control pills, hypodermic needles, pregnancy tests, for drawing blood, and for aiding women in fitting diaphragms. She pled guilty to one count of practicing medicine without a license as she had aiding a woman in fitting a diaphragm. She was fined $250 and sentenced to two years probation. Downer protested the punishment and is quoted with stating that "fitting a diaphragm was just like fitting a shoe."

Downer was also charged with practicing medicine without a license - she had helped activist Z. Budapest put yogurt into her vagina (a common home remedy for yeast infections at the time), and for showing a woman how to do a self-cervical exam. LA Deputy City Attorney David M. Schacter was convinced that the staff members at the clinic had been practicing medicine and insisted that all the procedures should have been performed by a qualified doctor. He is quoted with demanding: "Who are they to diagnose a yeast infection and prescribe yogurt for it?" To the women at the clinic, Schacter's attitude hinted towards men's monopolistic control of women. Downer pleaded not guilty and went to trial.

Downer's main defense for the trial was that the law that forbade laypeople from diagnosing and treating others was too vague. She argued that "if the state truly did enforce this law, a person could not pass a sneezing friend a tissue or bring over chicken soup for a cold." She even asked a doctor involved in her trial if a mother diagnosing her child's illness would qualify as practicing medicine without a license, to which he replied: "Well, we can't do anything about that." Her feminist attorneys, Diane Wayne and Jeanette Christy, requested and received a woman judge for the trial, which was a major accomplishment given the scarcity of women judges at the time. Downer closed her appeal with the quote: "This trial is a direct threat to our rights to know our own bodies. We not only expect to win, but we also want to give emphatic notice to all who would deny us this right as we will control our own bodies."

The Public's Reaction
Men and women around the nation rallied together to support Downer. This had the effect of disseminating more information on self-help across the nation. Women from all over called and wrote to Downer and the FWHC to offer their encouragement. Many people also sent money for the defense. Several well-known personalities, such as Gloria Steinem, Robin Morgan, and Dr. Benjamin Spock, publicly declared their support. Congresswoman Bella Abzuh is reported to have stated that "the trial was nothing less than a test case to determine whether women were allowed to examine their own bodies." Feminist anthropologist Margaret Mead is reported in the LA Times to have stated: "Men began taking over obstetrics, and they invented a tool... to look inside women. You would call this progress, except that women tried to look inside themselves, this was called practicing medicine without a license."

Verdict
The LAPD raided the clinic based on information given from two undercover witnesses: an ex-nun who had attended the session where the yogurt incident occurred, and a policewoman, Sharon Dalton, who was the main witness and who stated that Downer had offered to perform an abortion for her. Although, the defense was able to prove that Downer had not even been at the clinic on the date that Dalton claimed they spoke. In reality, Downer had flown to Portland, Oregon that day to conduct a workshop at the American Psychological Association conference.

Nine hours of deliberation later, a jury made up of three black women, one white woman, and eight white men, acquitted Downer of all charges. Her attorneys had successfully argued that the law was too vague and if it was truly followed, Downer and others would not have even been able to discuss a cold with a friend or "offer her a tissue." They went even further to point out that "half of the mothers in the county could be charged with diagnosing that their children had the measles."

Impact
The most significant impact that "The Great Yogurt Conspiracy" and trial had was that it brought national attention to self-examinations. Both large and small newspapers covered the event, including Times Magazine, Newsweek, and the New York Times. After the trial, many self-help activists saw a significant increase of interest in the use of the plastic speculum and received more requests for self-help presentations. The trial was seen as a "great victory for self-help and for women taking control of their bodies."

The case and trial set the precedent for other self-help clinics like it to operate legally. It revealed to the public how far authorities would go to eliminate the threat of self-help clinics, clinics which gave women control of their own health. If Downer had not been able to prove that she was in Portland, Oregon that day, her conviction would have been a serious setback to the women's health movement.