Rough Transcript

Season 2: Episode 3

Sherri

Hosts: Gillian Frank & Lauren Gutterman

Guests and Additional Audio: Sherri Chessen, Street Corner Narrator, How Much Affection Narrator

Sherri Chessen: My name is Sherri, actually my real name is Sharon, but when I became the Romper Room teacher in 1958, I think, they decided Ms. Sherri was cuter than Sharon. And so it’s been that ever since. So, Sherri Chessen is my maiden name, and a lot of people listening to this podcast might know the name Finkbine, I never was Sherri Finkbine even though I was on the air for an hour a day five days a week as Sherry Chessen. The press at that time, along with a lot of other things that women didn’t have or weren’t able to have, we couldn’t have our own names and I became Mrs. Finkbine or Sherry Finkbine and I resent the hell out of that. My name is Sherry Chessen and I became famous because I don’t know how to keep quiet when something egregious happens in my life.

Lauren Gutterman: In August of 1962, Sherri Chessen boarded a flight to Sweden in order to get an abortion. Her decision to terminate this pregnancy and her journey abroad attracted international attention from journalists, politicians, and a wider public.

Sherri’s story,  as  it was  told by the media, was significantly different than how journalists in the 1960s typically talked about abortion.  Until the early 1960s, newspapers represented abortion as a dirty business or a tragic affair. Sometimes women appeared in these stories as immoral or sexually irresponsible, reaping what they sewed. Other times they were portrayed as victims who deserved pity but were never entitled to control their reproduction. In popular culture, women’s decisions to seek out abortions, and even their deaths from botched procedures, represented lives at the margins of respectable society.  

Here’s a clip from the 1948 anti-abortion film Street Corner:

Street Corner Narrator: And so in [inaudible] and secrecy the criminal apparition is accomplished. Fear and ignorance come to add another victim to the ever-mounting toll, another human life has been destroyed by one of the most malignant practices of a civilized society: abortion. But not without punishment for those directly or indirectly responsible. A death has been incurred that must be paid in terms of pain and suffering.

Gillian Frank: Sherri Chessen transformed this narrative. She was pretty, white, middle class, and married with four children. Sherri was also the beloved host of a popular children’s television show called “Romper Room.”  

The media told Sherri’s story differently because of her reason for seeking out an abortion. During her pregnancy, Sherri took some of her husband’s tranquilizers to treat a terrible bout of morning sickness. Her husband bought these pills while he was in England. To her horror, Sherri learned that these pills contained a drug called thalidomide.  

In the early 1960s, thalidomide was used in over-the-counter medications in Europe such as sleeping pills and cough syrups. It hadn’t been approved in the United States. Despite its lack of approval, a number of Americans ingested medicines containing the thalidomide. In 1962, European and American newspapers reported that mothers who had taken thalidomide during their pregnancies were giving birth to babies with internal injuries and shortened limbs. Thalidomide also caused women to miscarry, deliver stillborn babies, or to have children who died during their infancy.  

All of these possible outcomes horrified Sherri. And her public attempt and ultimate failure to obtain a therapeutic abortion in the United States made headlines worldwide.

Lauren Gutterman: Sherri’s frustrating search for an abortion showed a wider public what countless American women had already experienced. Her widely shared story changed the way many Americans thought about abortion laws and even about abortion itself. In a 1962 cover story, Life magazine described Sherri’s agonizing decision to have an abortion with sympathy and delicacy. In the context of fierce national debates about abortion, Life magazine portrayed Sherri as making a thoughtful and careful decision and acting in her family’s best interest. “I have the way to prevent this tragedy, this sadness,” she was quoted as saying.

Much of the public support for Sherri’s choice to have an abortion was a result of the stigma associated with physical disabilities. Life magazine, for example, described Thalidomide as “the crippler,” and included pictures of disabled children alongside Sherri’s story. These images, as historian Leslie Reagan has explained, horrified many Americans, and shifted the ways in which they viewed abortion. Because of the real emotional and economic hardships that came from raising a disabled child half a century ago, as well as the negative meanings attached to disability, the thalidomide scare fostered greater support for women’s reproductive choices.

But Sherri’s story did more than connect abortion rights with opposition toward having children deformed by a dangerous drug. It enabled Americans to talk about the varied ways in which restrictive abortion laws forced women to have unwanted children; how the laws were unfairly applied and enforced; and how these laws harmed women and families by denying them access to safe, legal and affordable procedures. The specter of disabled bodies, in other words, dramatized how little control women had over their reproductive lives. Sherri’s story opened up a space for women to demand reproductive autonomy.  

Sherri’s story also reminds us that the history of abortion access isn’t simply a story of legal battles or marches, although it is that too. The history of abortion is made up of the intimate and sometimes agonizing decisions that women have made about their own bodies and futures. It is a history of unrecorded conversations between women and their loved ones, their clergy and their doctors. It is a history of economic sacrifice and long-distance travel across state lines and national borders in search of compassionate medical care. 

Gillian Frank: A number of historians and a 1992 movie about her ordeal have described aspects of Sherri’s life. These portrayals have focused on those few eventful months when her struggle to get an abortion captivated the world. However, we have yet to see a fuller picture of this remarkable woman, whose convictions reshaped reproductive politics before Roe v Wade.  

In this episode, we speak with Sherri Chessen to learn more about the circumstances leading up to her abortion. We talk with her about how she reckoned with an unwanted pregnancy, the experiences and values that shaped her decision, and how her abortion affected her life thereafter.  

Sherri’s story illuminates not only the struggles of her own generation, but also contemporary struggles over abortion access. During the past fifty years, opponents of abortion have worked hard to close the doors that Sherri helped to open. Today, most counties in the United States do not have a legal abortion provider. Women seeking abortions have to travel great distances and at great expense. And Mandatory waiting times are the norm. Sherri’s past in many ways is our present. And the restrictions she encountered—which only allowed for abortion when the mother’s life was at risk—threaten to become our future.

I’m Gillian Frank.

Lauren Gutterman: And I’m Lauren Gutterman. Welcome to Sexing History.

Sherri Chessen was born in 1932 in Duluth, Minnesota. She was the eldest of five children and grew up in what she later described as a family that was “poor, dysfunctional, and Jewish.” Open anti-Semitism was rampant in the United States during Sherri’s childhood. Parks, social clubs, swimming pools and some businesses displayed signs barring Jews. Social exclusion and economic instability, shaped Sherri’s childhood. Sherri’s experiences of anti-Semitism affected her profoundly. And even in her early life we see her willingness to challenge social norms and push against taken-for-granted boundaries.

Sherri Chessen: I was a normal kid, I was really normal. The one thing I did not like, is because my family wasn’t the same as the people around me I grew up with – it was very Scandinavian, everyone was Finnish or Norwegian or Swedish – and I didn’t like being different. I felt left out of a lot of things because my family was Jewish. In fact we couldn’t buy houses on certain streets in Duluth, and when I asked my mother why, she would just say, “It’s the way it is, it’s a gentleman’s agreement, that’s all you need to know.”

I went to girl scouts and my girl scout troop met at the Lutheran church and I would hope that people that people would see me walking in there and think that that was my church. And then after Christmas, people used to put their Christmas trees out front and I can remember pulling the Christmas tree, big big Christmas tree from the neighbors in front of our house so people would think we had that big Christmas tree.

The worst antisemitism, the first year at Wisconsin we were trying to pledge a sorority and I wanted to be a Kappa Alpha Theta and they called back to your home and I said, “Mom how was the conversation?” She said, “Oh I told them that you were ninth grade president, that you were senior high school president. They were very impressed with you and they liked you and they liked your personality and everything, and then they asked me what religion you were and I said, “Oh we’re Jewish.” And she said, “Well thank you, we’ve already reached our quota this year of Jewish girls.”” And you know what the quota was? The quota of one was done.

Gillian Frank: Even as she experienced anti-semitism, Sherri also found herself experiencing gender discrimination in school and in her synagogue.

Sherri Chessen: I got the kind of religion growing up that on what was called the “High Holy Days” you got to go, the women have upstairs and the men downstairs. Right away I started catching on at a very early age that we women, because my boy cousins were downstairs, my brothers were downstairs, my father was downstairs, why couldn’t we be downstairs. And I started realizing that women were second class citizens.

Gillian Frank: The history of gender discrimination is intimately tied to the history of abortion access and sex education. Sherri’s story reveals a broader pattern in which laws barring abortion access alongside of public opposition to comprehensive sex education limited women’s ability to control their reproductive lives.

When Sherri was coming of age in the 1940s, many women became pregnant because they had inadequate understandings of how their bodies worked and how to practice contraception. At that time, the content and quality of sex education in American high schools varied widely. Sometimes, schools taught students about sex in biology, health, physical education or so-called “family life education” classes. There, young women learned that they should abstain from sex before marriage and that they were responsible for saying “no” to boys who might ask them to be physically intimate.

How Much Affection Narrator: First, well it all seems quite a lark, you like someone he likes you. Everything is fun and affection. Then all at once you can find yourself in a situation where your physical urges fight against your reason, then those fine thoughts of love and affection can suddenly get twisted. In the height of emotion it’s not always easy to stop and think things through, but if you, if you just slow down the rush and pressure of your feelings a little. Then judgement to take hold and guide you away from wrong behavior, when you can rely on judgement rather than emotion to rule your behavior, then you’ll really be grown up.

Gillian Frank: That was a clip from the 1957 film How Much Affection. When Sherri was growing up, at most, young women might have learned basic anatomical and reproductive functions. Teachers, however, rarely spoke about contraception. Abortion was never discussed openly. And students who became pregnant were forced to leave school. Sherri remembers a world in which sex was surrounded by silence and secrecy.  

Sherri Chessen: What kind of messages did I receive about sex growing up? I don’t think I received any because it just was something that wasn’t talked about. Just like I had never heard the word abortion spoken before it happened to me. You know we’re talking, you know and I was in high school, I graduated high school in 1950 for gods sakes and I imagined with girlfriends we used to talk about how far did you go and did he get to first base and everything. Good girls didn’t do “things” with boys, but there was no formal education, no actual, you know, classes in it and when somebody did pregnant, only one girl that I know of, then it was all hush-hush terms and you were just glad it wasn’t you. But you didn’t know why it wasn’t you because you felt she was worse than you were.

Lauren Gutterman: In 1950, when Sherri graduated from high school, the median age for women at the time of their first marriage was between 20 and 21. Young white women, if they went to college, were expected to snag a husband while earning their degree. Most people assumed a middle-class white woman’s career was a placeholder between her years of education and her years of getting married and raising children.  

Sherri’s life mirrored these patterns. She went to the University of Wisconsin at Madison for college. During her final year, at age twenty, she married Bob Finkbine. After graduation, Sherri and Bob moved to Indiana to be near Bob’s parents, and they had their first two children. Bob and Sherri eventually decided they wanted to live someplace warmer and moved to Arizona. There, Sherri stepped outside of the mold of homemaker. She got a job hosting Romper Room, a popular children’s television show, while Bob taught at a local high school. Although Sherri worked outside the home, she and Bob took on conventional gender roles. Sherri did the cooking, cleaning, and caring for the kids after she came home from work.   

Bob and Sherri had a total of four children in five years. We asked Sherri if she planned her pregnancies and what these pregnancies meant to her. 

Sherri Chessen: Of course they weren’t, I didn’t even know how to plan a pregnancy. I didn’t know how not to become pregnant. The pill hadn’t been invented yet, that was 1960 I think, and I had three babies by that time. See the trouble with [laughs], the trouble with, the trouble with that question is: it’s hard for me to even think of why wasn’t I more careful.

We did what they called, what was it, I am thinking of the rhythm method. There was an old joke then the Catholics used to say they had the Rhythm method and we’d say, “You know what they call people who practice the rhythm method? Parents.” So I always thought I knew, and then there was another old wives tale that said, “While you’re nursing the baby you can’t get pregnant.” Well ha, ha, ha, yes you can, or yes I did and I’m not saying I didn’t want babies that fast. When you grow up in a family of five kids you just automatically take motherhood and large families for granted and I knew it was something that I wanted to do but no we did not, we did not plan the first four.

It was very normal. You went to college and you got what was called an MRS degree, you got married, then you had these babies. And then if you worked in a career you could do that after and that’s what I did, when we got to Arizona. I tried out for the Romper Room job and I was lucky enough to get it and started what was the best job of my whole life. And I, I just felt we were in hog heaven. I had our fourth baby and was able to go back after, you know six weeks or so and then I pulled the sky down over my head.

Gillian Frank: In 1962, Sherri was thirty-years-old. She was juggling four children and a thriving television career. She also lived in a world that systematically told women they were second class citizens. In most states, a married woman could not get a credit card or a mortgage in her own name.  Newspapers regularly published job ads that were sex segregated. And Americans lacked an official term to describe what we now call sexual harassment. The birth control pill had been on the market for two years but officially only married women could get them.

Sherri was pregnant with her fifth child when she learned that the sleeping pills she had taken contained Thalidomide. Sherri wrestled over whether to have an abortion, which she considered repulsive and unappealing.

In 1962, Sherri did not identify as a feminist, and she was not involved in political organizations or women’s groups. Sherri identified as a mother. Her sense of responsibility to her four young children, convinced her that having a fifth child who was likely to have tremendous physical challenges would be unfair to all of them. Her convictions dovetailed with mainstream understandings of disability as harmful to a happy family life. Here’s Sherri talking about her decision making in a 1966 speech.

Sherri Chessen: I speak to you as a mother who desperately needed a pregnancy terminated. I can truthfully say to you that an abortion was to me a very sad, ugly experience, but definitely the lesser of two evils. Three and a half years ago, when I discovered that I had inadvertently, while pregnant, taken a drug that would force me to give birth to a limbless child, a child as it turned out would be just a head and a torso. And believe me, the thought now years later still makes my heart pound and gives shivers all over, it really does.

Faced with, what at that time, was an unfortunate choice on either hand, my husband and I chose what we considered under the circumstances to be the most humane course of action. We could not knowingly bring a grossly deformed baby into the world to suffer. Also, we had at that time four small children all under the age of seven years old to consider: what would giving birth to a grossly deformed baby do to their lives? I think any mother listening to me now knows that the desire to protect your children is a very very strong trait in a woman.

Lauren Gutterman: During the early 1960s, national media outlets used offensive language to describe children born with disabilities calling them “cripples,” “freaks,” or “tragedies.” Unlike adults with disabilities, particularly those who sustained injuries from war or polio, children with disabilities were increasingly separated from mainstream life. Lacking social and medical support, parents or guardians often placed them in institutions.  

Sherri Chessen: Well, I had read on, on page like 23 of the Arizona Republic a story about doctors in England trying to practice euthanasia on babies being born without their limbs from a sleeping pill. And I thought, “Oh my god that’s horrible!” And I never equated it with myself because my pills were from England, they were called Distavol, but they were thalidomide, strong thalidomide, they just had a different name for them. Then they did a follow up story and they called it a tranquilizer and I thought, “Uh oh.” And I called my doctor and he said, “Bring in the bottle, that’s probably not it.” And we already knew I was pregnant with my fifth child.

And then he called us in, Bob and I in, and he said that, he said, “Sherry my wife and I also have four children, and if you were she I would tell you the same thing. If you really want to have a fifth baby, lets terminate this pregnancy and start again next month under better odds.” Well intellectually that sounded all, you know, well and good. And I said, he said, “You have to write a letter to a three man medical board.” And I said of course, “What if they don’t agree?” He said, “They already have, the operation is set for next Wednesday.” I said, “Oh I can’t go then that’s Mark’s 6th birthday.” He said, “Sherry the operation is next Wednesday.” I said, “Can I go to Saint Joes?” Because at the time I had a baby who was just 18 months old and I said I had just had the baby at St. Josephs hospital 18 months before that. And he said, “Sherri, you don’t have an abortion in a Catholic hospital.” That’s how much I knew. And he said, “If she wavers (meaning me) in her opinion, show her this picture, and if she doesn’t don’t show it to her.”

And he left. This was a Saturday morning, we had to come in through his back door because he had a Catholic associate and he said, “If anyone finds out I’m about to do an abortion, even though, they were doing them in the name of a good old DNC, that he said, “I may as well have my practice on the moon.” Of course as soon as the doctor left I wanted to see the picture, and I shouldn’t, it was pictures of about six little babies who were only heads. Their bodies were swaddled in clothes but they looked like little tacos sitting there with little heads and for 25 years I had a dream, those babies were in my dream.

Lauren Gutterman: In 1962, it was incredibly difficult for women to get an elective abortion, even if they had money. Doctors and hospitals stringently regulated medically necessary abortions. They only granted approval for a legal hospital abortion—called therapeutic abortion—if the pregnancy endangered a woman’s life. Recent medical advances meant that there were very few cases in which life-threatening pregnancies occurred.  

Some hospitals allowed abortions for psychiatric reasons, but even so, this avenue was restrictive and many women found it degrading. On the whole, women seeking legal abortions had to undergo stringent screening by hospital boards who were fearful of prosecution and public criticism. Hospitals were risk averse and press shy. They often denied women’s requests. When they allowed abortions, they did so quietly. Typically, women who were able to navigate this complex medical bureaucracy were white and middle or upper class. Poor women and women of color had even more limited access to legal, therapeutic abortion. They were more likely to turn to illegal and sometimes exploitative or unskilled abortion providers.  

Gillian Frank: As news of the danger of thalidomide spread, many doctors quietly broke the rules to help women who had taken the drug. Sherri’s doctor prescribed a therapeutic abortion, and the medical board at her local hospital approved. If all had gone according to plan, Sherri would have been able to terminate her pregnancy quickly and quietly. Sherri, however, made a fateful choice. She shared her story with the press in order to warn other women and their families about the perils of thalidomide. This decision thrust her into the spotlight and cost her the opportunity to get an abortion done near her home.  

Sherri Chessen: And everything would have been fine and dandy, except on Sunday the next day I started thinking of people who might have gotten ahold of this drug who should be warned. And so I said, “You know I’m gonna call Ed Murray.” He was the editor of the paper. And I called the Murray’s and Mr.Murray was not in, but his wife answered and I told her my story about thalidomide. And I said, “I think your newspaper needs to write a little story about taking pills that you don’t know what they are if you’re pregnant.” And she said, “Oh my, our medical reporter is doing an article about thalidomide, could he call you?” And I said, “Well he won’t use my name, will he?” And she says, “Oh my dear, [inaudible], of course not.” And I said, “Well sure I’d be glad to help.”

 So he called me and got the story and Monday morning on page one, did not use my name but with a black border around was a story that said, “Baby Deforming Drug May Cost Woman Her Child Here.” And it did say, “Father was a schoolteacher in Scottsdale and they had four small children.” Now that’s narrowing it down, but it’s not like what came out two days later saying, “Abortion mother Ms. Sherri.” I mean that pins it down.

That day I went to work, not knowing it was going to be the last time I was ever allowed to do Romper Room. That came out, I got off of the air from doing Romper Room and I remember saying, being told that I was wanted by my doctor and he told me the abortion was canceled because of the story. The county attorney had come out and said, “I’m going to make a citizen’s arrest on person having an abortion. And as soon as I put the phone down, saying my operation had been canceled, what did I do? Cry? No. Get pissed, yes.

I picked up the phone and called the county attorney’s office. And the voice was a young lawyer who didn’t identify himself I don’t think, and I said, “I just have one question for you, what does the county attorney’s office have to do with a private family deciding that the termination of a pregnancy is the best thing for them.” Something to that effect. The Arizona, existing Arizona law at that time said abortion is legal if necessary, to save the life of the mother. So what they wanted to do was go into court and get the declaratory statement on the word “life”. What did it mean to save the life of the mother?

So they decided to send me to two psychiatrists that night, and I will tell you, the first one, he was convinced I was trying to do something evil and he was asking me all these questions and with flash cards and I was giving him all the sassiest answers I could conjure up. And, you know, and then I remember saying, some answer to him saying, “Psychology 101.” And he not only recommended that we have the termination, but that, county protective services take away the children that I had because I was obviously an incompetent mother and further that I get sterilized so I can never again be pregnant. That was his take on this thing.

Then I went to the second psychiatrist which was at the Good Samaritan Hospital and I walked in and he said, you know, I walked in all waiting for more of the same, and that had been like three hours the night before. I walked in and said, “Would you like a doughnut?” And I said, “A doughnut?” And he said, “Yeah there’s no need for us to talk, I agree with you, I’ve already put in my report and so there we had two diverse opinions of what should go on. And I will tell you one thing to that lousy guy, I turned out to be a fabulous mother with great kids.

Then they went to court and the judge said, “As a man I would like to rule on this case, as a judge I cannot.” And he threw it out.

Lauren Gutterman: The public reaction to Sherri’s attempts to obtain an abortion were dramatic. She was deluged with letters of support and with angry letters that condemned her wish to terminate her pregnancy.  Sherri received so many death threats that the FBI had to offer her family protection.  

Sherri Chessen: The actual horror of the situation was brutally compounded for me, by the thousands of pieces of hate mail we received. It was unbelievable, really, that so much hate could be spewed in the name of religion. The worst letters, and I, and I do admit I am an overly sensitive person, I always have been, but the worst ones were those that threatened the lives of my husband and my children. How people can be so unfeeling towards thousands of hungry, needy, homeless babies, yet so concerned with the welfare of one obscure mass of tissue just absolutely amazed me. Other letters screamed at us, “I hope someone takes the other four and strangles them because its all the same thing.” From long beach somebody told me, “I hope god punishes you for your murderous sin.” A Chicago minister warned, “That it was his duty as god’s holy prophet to inform us that god would pour his wrath on us and his family if we failed to heed him.”

Lauren Gutterman: Because abortion laws in the United States were so restrictive, some women with the financial means went abroad where regulations were more lenient. Japan and Sweden had fairly liberal laws. Countries like Mexico had a thriving and largely unregulated underground abortion industry. When she couldn’t get an abortion in Arizona, Sherri looked at traveling to another state. As news of her attempts spread across the country, no hospital in the US would grant her an abortion. She began looking abroad for help. 

Sherri Chessen: People didn’t want us to be in their, venue to speak, because they would become a beacon, for agreeing with abortion. And at that time, no one was willing to do that, and believe me we had feelers out from the newspapers from everywhere, and the news came back to me, “The easiest thing Sherri, is go to Japan. Go to Japan because you get in a taxi, you hold up twenty dollars, and you say “hospital”, and they will take you and there’s no falderal, there’s no interrogation you just go and tell them what you want.”

Well, we got as far as LA and the Japanese government would not give Bob a visa, because they too, they too, the whole country, was afraid of feedback from Americans who disagreed with them. So no visa, no Japan. And the reason we went to Sweden, was because one of their reporters, you know who I think was a vice president, Burnt Bornholm who had called us and Phoenix and said, “We have a very liberal system here, you would have to go through a approximately three week interrogation by doctors and medical board, like any Swedish citizen. But if we can ever help you, here’s my contact number.”

Well, when you’re turned away from one country after another and incidentally if you said Mexico in there, no way at that time is Mexico where you went to get an inexpensive quart of Kahlúa or whatever you wanted to buy, but not for operations. And I with four small children was not going to put myself in medical jeopardy and that is the worst thing about back-alley abortions. You are in, I’ve never used the term before or heard it, but I’m coining it right now: medical jeopardy. And that’s where we don’t want any of us to have to be. And so Sweden sounded good, we got in touch with them, they made all the arrangements, and that’s why we went to Sweden.

When we landed in Sweden, then, the newspaper was very kind, they took us to dinner that night and I looked out and we were in a port and it looked like, to me, my hometown of Duluth Minnesota. And I just started to, I can cry just thinking about it, I felt so far away, so forlorn, so, so, why am I in this situation when it would be so easy to be home with my own doctor in my own hospital in my own city and with my own family. But no, there I was, half a world away trying to something that I felt I had to do. And so, I tried to be a big girl and stop crying and just tell them that I felt sentimental and everything.

They put me into the hospital, into Caroline Hospital and so it began. I, you know, had all the little things that they do to you before an operation, and the next day it was, you know it was over and done with. After the operation was over and completed, I said the same thing to the doctor that I had said four times before and that was, “Was the baby a boy or a girl?” And he said, “It was not a baby, it was an abnormal growth that never would be a normal child.” And that sentence has comforted me for half a century.

Gillian Frank: News of Sherri’s abortion sparked a widespread religious discussion about the morality abortion. The Catholic Church condemned Sherri’s actions as a crime. In a public rebuke the Vatican stated, "Human life is sacred. Love always chooses life, never death." In stark terms the Vatican announced, “Homicide is never an act of goodness.”

Sherri rebutted the Vatican with the following: “I feel it was God’s will that I discovered my baby might be deformed and I was able to prevent its birth. It is as if I saw one of my children running out in front of a truck and I rushed out to pull it back from death. I feel grateful to God for allowing me to find out about thalidomide in time to keep me from bringing a baby into the world without arms.”

Sherri grew up Jewish and after she moved to Arizona, she joined a Unitarian Universalist Church. Both traditions placed her squarely within an emergent pro-choice religious context. Her own minister publicly defended her right to choose an abortion and the Unitarian Universalists would issue a public statement the following year urging abortion reform.

Jewish leaders also increasingly supported abortion reform. Rabbi Israel Margolies, who later became a prominent abortion rights activist, criticized “The medieval barbarity of birth control taboos and abortion laws.” The rabbi was outraged that Sherri "was compelled” in his words “to seek compassion and help abroad that were denied in her own country.”  

Widespread stigma about disability amplified this religious support for abortion rights. Many Americans simultaneously advocating for greater medical freedom while perpetuating understandings of disabled people as less than human. For Margolies “The truly civilized mind would be hard put to devise a greater sin than to condemn an innocent infant to the twilight world of living death, or to sentence two innocent parents to a life term of caring for . . . a creature who is a grotesque mockery of God’s image.”

Lauren Gutterman: This kind of language was everywhere. For example, Paul Coates a syndicated LA Times columnist wrote in an op-ed, “It's barbaric that our laws force a woman like Sherri to leave the country in order to avoid the chance of giving-birth to a horribly twisted, infant. And the chance is pretty high.” 

Against this backdrop of anxieties about thalidomide and disability and in the face of restrictive laws, many Americans wondered why women were not able to access abortion more easily in the United States.

In September 1962, a Gallup poll revealed deep divisions over Sherri’s choice in particular and abortion access in general. But remarkably, the majority of respondents supported Sherri’s choice and were in favor of liberalized abortion rules.  

Sherri’s abortion marked only a brief moment in her life, but she continued to feel the impact of it in the short term and long afterwards. 

When Sherri returned to the United States, she found that she’d lost her job at the Romper Room as well as the advertising accounts she’d had.  

Sherri Chessen: Well, life was beautiful in the face that I had my four children back, that goes without saying, but life was horrible for me because I went to the TV station and was told by the vice president of the NBC station there that I was no longer fit to handle children so I could never do Romper Room again. And even he a couple years later, called me and asked me if I could help his daughter who needed an abortion.

Lauren Gutterman: Sherri was intent on returning to television, despite the refusal of the Romper Room’s producers to reinstate her as the show’s host. She mobilized her friends and colleagues in Phoenix to pressure the station. They demanded that she not be fired. She eventually got a brief ten-to-fifteen-minute local television spot, “Here’s Sherri.” Her show was so successful that the station expanded it to a forty-five-minute slot. Later, she hosted “Phoenix After Dark” and her own program, “The Sherri Chessen Show” on Saturday nights, on which she discussed controversial, contemporary political issues.  

Although she feared that her Thalidomide use might have permanently affected her ability to have healthy babies, Sherri had two more children, both of whom were unaffected by her previous exposure to the drug.  

Sherri also continued to work as an abortion advocate before Roe v Wade. Over the years Sherri provided medical referrals and emotional support to many women who contacted her in desperate need of a safe abortion.  

Sherri Chessen: I, I got phone calls like I was some kind of leading authority, when in fact my termination was the first time I had ever dealt with it, the first time I had ever talked about it, the first person in my family and my friends who had ever, that I knew at that time, had an abortion. But it’s just like, say you fall and break your arm, and you got your arm in a sling and a cast, and people come up to you and they say, you start hearing these stories about how they broke their arm.

It just engenders that type of response, well I started getting phone calls about places that they could go close to Phoenix and we did know of a place in Agua, Preita, Mexico was just over the border form Douglass, Arizona that people had told me about. And so that’s all I could do if, first of all I would listen to their story, and every one of them, everybody has a story and they were sad and, you know, I would cry along with them and I’d say, “Okay let’s think. The only information I can give you. And this in no was is my telling you, this is what you should do, that’s your decision and you remember there was no pro-choice yet. And I said, “That is your decision, because I don’t want the responsibility of making those decisions for you but I would like to help you find a way to do what you want to do.” And I would simply give them that address, because it was all I knew. It was all I knew.

Gillian Frank: Sherri’s resilience was apparent when she faced yet another major life challenge. In the early 1970s, Sherri discovered her husband had been repeatedly sexually unfaithful. This discovery devastated her. 

Although she briefly tried to make their marriage work, Sherri decided to divorce her husband. In doing so she joined the growing numbers of women who left unhappy marriages and struck out on their own. Despite the economic and practical challenges she faced as a single mother, Sherri was undaunted. With her six kids in tow—her youngest was then only four years old—she drove to California, and began a new chapter of her life in San Diego. In California she continued working as an actor. She made a living performing on the radio and in theater, and eventually became a realtor.

Lauren Gutterman: Many scholars have pointed to Sherri’s case as marking a major turning point in public attitudes towards abortion, and in the national abortion movement. By 1965 more than 77 percent of Americans supported the legalization of abortion “where the health of the mother is in danger.” That year, The New York Times joined a number of legal associations, medical groups, and religious denominations in calling for abortion reform. By then, Sherri’s name had become shorthand for the unjustness of abortion laws, even as her story had already become an argument for the need for medical privacy and women’s right to choose. 

Today, Sherri recognizes the lasting impact her case had on public opinion towards abortion rights, and she’s gratified to think that her story helped to pave the path for Roe v. Wade.  

Gillian Frank: Sherri Chessen had little desire to become a reproductive rights activist. The fact that she became a public figure was, in many ways, circumstantial. At the same time, we should not underestimate Sherri’s force of will, or strength of character. Her actions reinforced a growing public commitment to reproductive rights.

Sherri’s decision to have an abortion and the public’s sympathy for her was shaped by Sherri’s respectability and by the widespread anxiety and concern about raising disabled children. But Sherri’s abortion made room for a broader national conversation about reproductive rights. As a result, other women who wanted abortions, had obtained abortions, or were unable to secure them safely and legally, were increasingly able to share their stories public.

Here’s Sherri in 1966

Sherri Chessen: If by speaking out against the drug, I prevented even one baby from this type of birth, and one mother from the heartbreak of seeing it born, then my hurt, has been small indeed. Then too, I hope that our case serves as a catalyst for abortion reform in our country, I think it pointed up a real human need and forced people to at least talk about it and face the issue. I still get at least three calls a week, mostly from mothers with young daughters in trouble, and the sadness of some of the situations are shattering, is shattering I should say. Everyone is powerless to help them and they grasp in their dire desperation for any straw in the wind.

Lauren Gutterman: Sherri’s life choices, including and beyond her abortion, also reflect broader trends in women’s history, the history of religion, and the history of sexuality. These are seen in her determination to control her reproduction, her belief in the morality of her choice, her commitment to combining motherhood and a career, and her decision to end her marriage despite the challenges she faced as a single mother. Surely, countless other women made similar choices without ever stepping into the spotlight. But together such individuals redefined the meaning and practice of reproductive freedom.  

And yet, Sherri’s struggle remains urgently relevant. Despite the Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade, women seeking abortions continue to be burdened in many of the same ways Sherri was five decades ago: many must travel for days at a time, at great personal and financial cost, to clinics burdened with unnecessary regulations. Since 1982, conservative religious activism, targeted harassment, and onerous legal regulations have shuttered clinics across the United States. “At no time since before 1973,” one recent report says, “has a woman’s ability to terminate pregnancy been more dependent on her zip code or financial ability to travel.”  

In these ways, the social forces Sherri struggled with continue to shape the present. But Sherri’s story is also a powerful reminder at this moment when abortion’s legality is more technical than meaningful for millions of women. Individual stories, how we tell them, and whether we can hear them, can make apparent the punishing effects of limiting access to reproductive healthcare. As Sherri Chessen has shown, these same stories can also galvanize widespread social change.

Sherri Chessen: In today’s political climate, I would hope that my story and knowing what I went through could happen again and reinforce everyone who believes that it shouldn’t to know that we cannot and will not go backwards. We will not go back to the back alleys, we will not – abortion needs to be safe and it needs to be rare. But we’ve got to educate our kids as to what can happen and to show them what did happen and to hope and pray that they would want to work hard enough to make sure it does not happen again.

Gillian Frank: Sexing History is produced by Rebecca Davis, Saniya Lee Ghanoui, Devin McGeehan Muchmore, Jayne Swift, Lauren Gutterman and me.

Our intern is Alexie Glover.

Special thanks to Sherri Chessen for sharing her story with us. You can find a link to Sherri’s children’s books on our website www.sexinghistory.com

Lauren Gutterman: Sexing History is made possible with generous funding from a 2018 Media Production Grant from the Humanities Media Project in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas, Austin. The Humanities Media Project aims to tell human stories and invite critical conversations that educate, inspire, and connect communities. They believe that the humanities play a crucial role in maintaining a healthy, democratic society.

Gillian Frank: If you’re enjoying our show, you can help new listeners find us. Please review us on Apple Music and share us on social media.

From all of us at Sexing History, thanks for listening.

[End of Audio]

Transcription by Ian McCabe, University of Delaware