The Woman America Punished for Choosing: Sherri Finkbine’s Courageous Fight for Medical Freedom

 

 

She had no idea that a pill her husband brought back from Europe would cost her privacy, her career, and eventually force her to leave the United States for medical care.

 

In early 1962, Sherri Chessen was thirty years old.

 

To children in Phoenix, she was Miss Sherri, the cheerful host of the locally produced Romper Room.

 

She was married to high school teacher Bob Finkbine and already had four children.

 

Every weekday, she earned about 110 dollars a week leading children through songs, games, and lessons about being a “Do-Bee” instead of a “Don’t-Bee.”

 

At the end of each program, she looked through her famous Magic Mirror and called out children’s names, creating the feeling that she could somehow see every young viewer sitting at home.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Parents trusted her.

 

Children loved her.

 

She had won a regional Emmy.

 

When she appeared in public, children lined up for autographs.

 

Then Sherri became pregnant with her fifth child.

 

The pregnancy was difficult almost immediately.

 

She suffered severe morning sickness and chest discomfort.

 

Bob had recently returned from supervising forty students during a ten-week trip through Europe.

 

While in London, he had seen a doctor for exhaustion and been prescribed tranquilizers.

 

He used a few.

 

They helped.

 

So he brought the remaining pills home.

 

When Sherri’s nausea became unbearable, she began taking them.

 

The medication worked.

 

She felt better.

 

She continued filming the television show, caring for her family, and preparing for another baby.

 

Then, in July 1962, she heard terrifying reports coming out of Europe.

 

A sedative called thalidomide, which had been promoted as safe for pregnant women, was being linked to thousands of babies born with devastating abnormalities.

 

 

 

 

 

Missing limbs.

 

Flipper-like arms and legs.

 

Damaged organs.

 

Severe spinal deformities.

 

Sherri checked the bottle she had been taking.

 

It contained thalidomide.

 

And she had taken multiple doses during the first trimester, precisely when a developing baby’s limbs and organs were most vulnerable.

 

Her doctor confirmed the danger.

 

The risk of major birth defects was extremely high.

 

There was no prenatal test capable of telling them how severe the damage might be.

 

Sherri and Bob already had four healthy children.

 

They also understood what raising a profoundly disabled child meant in America in 1962.

 

There was almost no public support.

 

Few accommodations.

 

Little government assistance.

 

And most of the responsibility would fall directly onto the family, especially the mother.

 

After considering the situation, they decided to seek a therapeutic abortion.

 

Arizona law made that nearly impossible.

 

Abortion was permitted only when necessary to save the mother’s life.

 

Severe fetal abnormality was not enough.

 

Sherri’s physician sympathized with her and quietly arranged for the procedure at Good Samaritan Hospital in Phoenix.

 

Then Sherri made a decision that changed everything.

 

 

 

 

 

She wanted to warn other women.

 

More middle-class Americans were traveling to Europe, and she worried that other pregnant women might unknowingly bring home or take thalidomide just as she had.

 

So she contacted The Arizona Republic.

 

She hoped the warning could be published anonymously.

 

On July 23, 1962, the newspaper ran the story under the headline “Pill May Cost Woman Her Baby.”

 

But it identified her as Romper Room’s Miss Sherri.

 

Her private medical crisis became national news.

 

Good Samaritan Hospital immediately became afraid of prosecution.

 

The planned abortion was canceled.

 

Her doctor asked Superior Court for permission to proceed.

 

The judge declined, saying the court lacked the authority to approve it.

 

Meanwhile, the pregnancy continued.

 

Every passing day mattered.

 

Then the media frenzy began.

 

Letters poured into Sherri’s home.

 

Some were compassionate.

 

Many were vicious.

 

Anonymous threats were made against her children.

 

The situation became serious enough that the FBI became involved in protecting the family.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Religious leaders condemned her.

 

The Vatican criticized the decision.

 

Ministers preached about her supposed “sin.”

 

Editorial pages across the country debated whether she was morally entitled to make a decision about her own pregnancy.

 

Millions of strangers suddenly felt entitled to judge a situation they had never lived through.

 

With every legal option in Arizona effectively closed, Sherri and Bob looked outside the country.

 

They contacted doctors in Sweden, where abortion could be permitted when a woman’s mental health was considered endangered.

 

Swedish physicians agreed to evaluate her.

 

In August 1962, Sherri flew to Stockholm.

 

The press followed nearly every detail.

 

What she wore.

 

How she looked.

 

What mood she seemed to be in.

 

Where she walked in the airport.

 

Her private medical emergency had become public spectacle.

 

On August 18, doctors at Karolinska Hospital performed the abortion.

 

The examination afterward confirmed what Sherri had feared.

 

The fetus had devastating abnormalities.

 

There were no legs.

 

Only one partially developed arm.

 

Other abnormalities were so severe that survival would have been impossible.

 

Sherri returned to Phoenix with medical confirmation that her concerns had been justified.

 

It did not save her career.

 

The television station decided she was no longer suitable to work with children.

 

They fired her.

 

The contradiction was difficult to miss.

 

 

 

 

 

 

As long as Sherri played the cheerful, nurturing television mother, she was considered ideal.

 

But once she made an independent medical decision during a crisis, she became unacceptable.

 

Yet public opinion was beginning to move in another direction.

 

In August 1962, Gallup asked Americans about abortion for the first time.

 

Fifty-two percent said they believed Sherri had done the right thing.

 

Among men, the number was fifty-four percent.

 

Among women, fifty percent.

 

Thirty-two percent disagreed.

 

Her case became part of a rapidly expanding national conversation about abortion law.

 

By 1965, seventy-seven percent of Americans supported legal abortion when a mother’s health was endangered.

 

Legal scholars would later argue that the visibility of Sherri’s case helped soften public attitudes and contributed to the political climate that eventually led to Roe v. Wade in 1973.

 

One of the attorneys involved in that case later personally thanked her.

 

But public sympathy did not immediately restore what she had lost.

 

For six months, Sherri had no television work.

 

Eventually, under pressure from supporters, the station offered her a small fifteen-minute program called Here’s Sherri.

 

The expectation seemed to be that it would quietly disappear.

 

Instead, she found sponsors.

 

Fifteen minutes became thirty.

 

Then an hour.

 

She rebuilt.

 

In 1964, Sherri became pregnant again.

 

There were concerns about whether earlier thalidomide exposure could somehow matter.

 

She researched the issue.

 

The available science was inconclusive.

 

She chose to continue the pregnancy.

 

The baby was born healthy.

 

Then the television station fired her again.

 

This time, because she had become pregnant and given birth.

 

She had lost one job after terminating a pregnancy that was not viable.

 

Then lost another after carrying a pregnancy to term.

 

The common thread was that Sherri kept making decisions about her own reproductive life instead of allowing other people to make them for her.

 

She and Bob Finkbine divorced in 1973.

 

Sherri later remarried twice.

 

She eventually had two more children, bringing her total to six.

 

She wrote children’s books addressing issues including bullying and gun violence.

 

She continued working in media.

 

But she never completely escaped the label attached to her in 1962.

 

The woman from the abortion case.

 

She also never said she regretted what she had done.

 

In July 2022, after Roe v. Wade was overturned, Sherri spoke publicly again.

 

She was eighty-nine years old.

 

“I was thrown out of my doctor’s office, out of the city, and out of the state,” she told CBS News. “We can’t go back to willow sticks and knitting needles.”

 

As of 2025, at ninety-three, she remained an advocate.

 

Her story was never only about one woman.

 

Thousands of American women faced devastating pregnancies during that era without cameras, newspapers, lawyers, or national attention.

 

Many carried non-viable pregnancies because the law gave them no alternative.

 

Others risked dangerous illegal procedures.

 

Most endured it quietly.

 

Sherri did something different.

 

She spoke because she wanted to warn other women.

 

And America punished that openness.

 

Her children were threatened.

 

Her livelihood disappeared.

 

Her pregnancy became international news.

 

Her private decision became a public trial.

 

The pressure was designed, in part, to make silence look safer than honesty.

 

She refused.

 

Sherri Finkbine insisted that loving children could also mean preventing suffering.

 

That medical reality sometimes demands painful choices.

 

And that women were capable of making those choices themselves.

 

In 1962, that idea was treated as radical.

 

For many people, it still is.