"Harvey engaged in some very irresponsible experimentation on women's bodies," said Carol Downer, who co-founded feminist women's health clinics in Southern California in the 1970s.
The incident was investigated by the national Centers for Disease Control, where Darney worked at the time. Darney called the super coil a "bad idea" but added, "I don't think that offsets the importance" of Karman's other contributions.
Downer agreed, calling Karman "a real change agent" whose invention gave momentum to the abortion rights movement in the period before the procedure was legalized by the 1973 Supreme Court case Roe vs. Wade. "I would never take away from the importance of a lot of the work he did," she said.
Karman was born Harvey Walters on April 26, 1924, in the tiny northwest Oregon town of Clatskanie. He did not know his father, and his mother, who led a transient lifestyle, often left him in orphanages. When she married, he took the last name of his stepfather.
A high school dropout, he joined the Army Air Forces and was stationed in England during World War II. After completing his military service, he used the GI Bill to attend UCLA, where he earned a bachelor's in theater and a master's in psychology. He later became director of psychosomatic research at San Vicente Hospital in Los Angeles.
He became interested in abortion when he was conducting research at UCLA on the emotional aspects of therapeutic abortion. During this time a student with an unplanned pregnancy committed suicide and another died from a botched abortion. Karman responded by helping women obtain illegal abortions in Mexico. Unhappy with the high prices and poor care some of the women received, he began performing abortions himself.
His ultimate goal, according to Darney, who met Karman in the early 1970s, was to "make it possible for women to safely do their own abortions using the simplest possible equipment."
Working with Merle Goldberg, a medical writer and women's health activist, Karman developed a method for extracting menstrual blood during the first weeks after a missed period with a vacuum syringe and a flexible plastic tube about the width of a drinking straw.
The device could be manually operated and, because of the narrowness of the tube, caused less discomfort than the larger metal curets that were normally used in abortions.
