The Forgotten Story of Shirley Wheeler – By Susan Matthews (Slate) / June 1, 2022
Two women changed the debate about abortion in America forever. We only remember one for a reason. Introducing Slow Burn, Season 7.
When you read almost any book about the history of abortion in America, one name comes up again and again: Sherri Chessen. Sherri—who, tellingly, was often identified as Sherri Finkbine, though she didn’t use her husband’s surname—was a television personality on a kids show called Romper Room back in the early 1960s. She lived in Arizona, and she was the mother of four kids. When she got pregnant with her fifth baby, she’d been having trouble sleeping, so she took a sleeping pill her husband had recently bought over the counter on a trip to England.
The sleeping pill was thalidomide. When she told her doctor she’d been taking it, he told her that she’d better come into his office: Thalidomide had been associated with extreme birth defects. Sherri consulted with her doctor, and she decided that the right thing to do, given the risks to the fetus, was to get an abortion. She was devastated by the choice, but she couldn’t imagine making a different one. And she was worried that other women might be in a similar situation, so she used her platform to warn them about the dangers of thalidomide to fetal development.
The problem was that this happened in 1962, and abortion was illegal in the state of Arizona unless the pregnancy threatened the health of the mother. There was no protocol for what to do if the pregnancy threatened the fetus. As soon as she started speaking out about what she was facing, authorities in the state of Arizona told her that she wouldn’t be able to get an abortion after all. A firestorm ensued. Sherri tried to make a plan to travel Japan for the procedure, but she was denied entry. She eventually had to travel all the way to Sweden to get her abortion.
CONTINUE > https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/06/roe-supreme-court-abortion-ruling-slow-burn-podcast.html
