Where is sherri finkbine now

Fifty-two percent of respondents in a Gallup poll thought she had done the right thing. Her story reminds us today of the devastating impact of abortion restrictions we have since overturned.

Although she was able to obtain an abortion overseas, for many more women with unintended pregnancies, that kind of travel was unaffordable or otherwise impossible, and the obstacles they faced drove them to seek dangerous — and even deadly — illegal abortions. Although her name is so closely associated with abortion, Sherri Finkbine, now Sherri Chessen, always made children a significant part of her life, from her role in Romper Room to her role as a mother and grandmother.

Chessen had six children from her first marriage and, in her later marriage, six stepchildren. A remarkable person to say the least, Chessen has shaped our understanding of important issues for the better. Matt, thank you for this post.

I have never heard about this brave woman, having been just a few years too young to have heard about her at the time. We truly do stand on the shoulders of giants, or at least we stand on the shoulders of those who were strong enough to stand up for what was right. Keep up the great reporting, and thanks for all you do for health rights in AZ! Hi, Nora. The financial and emotional strain of properly caring for a severely disabled child would have been overwhelming. But that was not the reason Sherri chose to terminate the pregnancy.

Women also are punished by the lawmakers who make the rules and set restrictions on abortion — and the courts that interpret those rules and restrictions, Sherri said. Women who get abortions, for whatever reason, are punished by society, she said, which inserts itself into a conversation that should be between a woman and her doctor.

After the couple returned from Sweden, Bob returned to teaching at Arcadia High School in Phoenix, though without his student teacher, who had been Catholic. Sherri was labeled "unfit to work with children" by a local television official. She eventually got a slot on a local TV talk show, but in , she quit as soon as it was obvious that she was pregnant again. She and Bob would have two more children, both healthy, before they divorced in Of all of it — the media circus, the legal wrangling, the struggle to start over — it was the hateful things that people said that hurt the most, Sherri said.

People talked about her behind her back. Some said terrible things to her face. Sherri's story appears in books and other literature about the history of reproductive rights in the United States, depicted as a pivotal moment. The stories and pictures, in particular a piece in Life magazine that year, put a real face on an issue that had been only whispered about.

It was a face that women already knew from television, someone they could relate to. What would they do in her situation? In a Gallup poll that year, 52 percent of respondents thought Sherri had done the right thing.

Opinions were changing. Eleven years later, a case involving another woman, Roe vs. Wade, had worked its way to the U.

Supreme Court. After the Roe vs. Wade decision was issued, Sherri met the year-old attorney from Texas who argued the case, Sarah Weddington, while working at a radio station in California. Weddington hugged Sherri and told her, "Your case made my argument so much easier. Sherri does not regret the abortion, but that doesn't mean she doesn't think about it. She thinks about it all the time. For 25 years, night after night, Sherri had the same nightmare. She would see that black-and-white picture of those infants propped up on the couch, except the baby on the left had the face of her youngest son, Stevie.

It was the only picture she had ever seen of a baby affected by thalidomide. She wished she had never seen it. Sherri is now the grandmother of six and great-grandmother of three. She remarried in to David Pent, an obstetrician and gynecologist who happened to practice in the hospital that turned her down for the abortion all those years ago. All hell broke loose after the interview appeared: the hospital cancelled the appointment for the abortion, her broadcaster fired her, and she and her husband received death threats, making FBI protection necessary.

When her doctor tried to obtain a court order to force the hospital to observe the appointment, the court declared that it did not have the authority to make a decision in the matter. Sherri and her husband then applied for a visa for Japan, intending to have an abortion there, but the Japanese consul turned them down. After some effort, she was finally able to have the abortion her doctor recommended in Sweden. Afterward, it turned out that the foetus had no legs and only one arm, would not have survived long after birth, and even determining its sex was not possible due to its extreme deformities.

Faced with the prospect of giving birth to a limbless child, Finkbine bucked her saccharine TV image of those days and defied an Arizona court by traveling to Sweden to abort her fetus.

And yet it is no accident that the blatantly pro-abortion rights story will air just three months before the presidential election. Increasingly, HBO is making a name for itself by producing in-house movies featuring big screen stars in controversial stories that neither Fox nor the three mainstream networks will touch for fear of upsetting sponsors, viewers or network affiliates.

Despite the passage of three decades, however, not a lot has changed in terms of U. Finkbine, who now goes by her maiden name of Sherri Chessen, although she recently remarried having divorced Robert Finkbine several years ago. A male majority on the Supreme Court and in most state legislatures still have the power to decide whether a woman may abort her unborn child, they pointed out.