Medicine1962; Abortion & the Law: Thalidomide

• Share

Abortion & the Law

A healthy and happily married Arizona woman, mother of four children, last week went to court to ask approval for an illegal act: getting an abortion. Her fifth child, she fears, might be hideously deformed as a result of her taking the sleeping pill thalidomide.

The drug, marketed in many countries under a variety of trade names, has already caused an estimated 5,000 babies to be born malformed in Germany and almost 1,000 in Britain: infants without limbs or with stubby, seal-like flippers or with internal defects such as displaced or missing organs. At least four cases of thalidomide malformation have appeared in the U.S. and more may yet be confirmed, because American women got the sleeping pills overseas or from travelers. (It has not been licensed for sale in the U.S.)

Robert Finkbine, a high school history teacher in Scottsdale, near Phoenix, bought thalidomide pills for himself in London last year and took some home.

For months, the pills lay in the medicine cabinet untouched. His wife Sherri became pregnant early in May. With four children ranging in age from 20 months to eight years, she is a busy housewife, and as Sherri Chessen, she is also the star of a daily 55-minute Romper Room program on Phoenix's KTAR-TV. To quiet her nerves and ensure sleep, Sherri Finkbine took some of the British pills—in the second month of her pregnancy, when the danger that the drug will damage the fetus is greatest. Only then did she learn that what she had been taking was thalidomide.

But Arizona law, like that in virtually all the states, prohibits abortion for any other reason than to save the mother's life. Both state and county law officers said that if the operation were performed on Mrs. Finkbine, they would have to prosecute all parties involved—including the physicians. Possible punishment: two to five years in prison.

Sherri Finkbine took a bold decision.

She gave up trying to remain anonymous. The Finkbines joined Hospital Administrator Stephen Morris in asking Superior Court for a declaratory judgment to bar any legal reprisals. Sherri Finkbine's health, said her attorneys, "is such that the termination of her pregnancy is necessary for the preservation and saving of her life."

Says Sherri Finkbine: "It would be the crudest thing in the world to let my baby be born with only a 50-50 chance of being normal."