Carol 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. 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 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