Lorraine Rothman

Lorraine Rothman (1932 - September 25, 2007) was a founding member of the feminist Self-Help Clinic movement. In 1971, she invented the Del-Em menstrual extraction kit with Carol Downer, to provide abortion to women before Roe v Wade. According to Lorraine, she thought, "What did women do before there were doctors? Let's stop the humiliation of trying to persuade the powers that be to legalize abortion. Let's just take back the technology, the tools, the skills and the information to perform early abortions and be in charge of our own reproduction."

She was born Lorraine Fleishman in San Francisco, California in 1932. While working full time, she attended Los Angeles City College and California State University in Los Angeles, where she received a BA and teaching credential in 1954. After marrying in 1954, she moved to Baltimore with her husband, Al Rothman, and began teaching in the Baltimore Public School System. She returned to California with her husband and children in 1964 and resumed public school teaching.

In 1968, Rothman first joined a local women's liberation group that met at CSU Fullerton, and then became a founding member of the Orange County chapter of NOW. Rothman's collaborative relationship with Carol Downer and the Self-Help Clinic movement began when she attended a meeting organized by Downer to discuss women's reproductive rights and abortion. Rothman volunteered to adapt equipment in use for manual vacuum aspiration for non-professional use. A week after her first meeting with Downer, she demonstrated the prototype of the Del-Em menstrual extraction kit for their group. Shortly afterwards, Downer and Rothman founded the Feminist Women's Health Center (FWHC) in Los Angeles.

Over the next two decades, Rothman traveled widely, taking the Self-Help Clinic concept to women's groups both in and outside the US. In addition to working as an administrator, Rothman wrote health education guides for the FWHCs. In 1999, Rothman co-authored a book critical of hormone replacement therapy. Of HRT she has said, "Hormone Replacement Therapy is a misnomer: they are not hormones (they are drugs made synthetically in the laboratory), they are not replacing anything (our bodies continue to make enough hormones during and after menopause), and they are not therapeutic (menopause is not a disease)."

Lorraine Rothman died of bladder cancer on September 25, 2007.