#ROMPER ROOM MAGIC MIRROR TV#

Sherri was labeled 'unfit to work with children' by a local television official. 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.Īfter the couple returned from Sweden, Bob returned to teaching at Arcadia High School in Phoenix, though without his student teacher, who had been Catholic. 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. 'Just pondering whether to do it or not is a mental anguish,' Sherri said. 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. The couple had four children at the time, the oldest just 7. The FBI stationed agents at their Scottsdale home.

Someone threatened to cut off their children's arms and legs. Reporters camped out in the front yard.īoth Sherri and Bob received death threats. Women didn’t have abortions and if they did, they certainly didn’t discuss it. Now it was all out in the open.Īs Sherri and her husband awaited the judge’s ruling, letters flooded their mailbox. This was 1962, a time when abortion was not only illegal but unthinkable.

#ROMPER ROOM MAGIC MIRROR TV#

“In Abortion Case” was in smaller letters and then bigger, in all capital letters, stretching the front page: “MOTHER TV STAR HERE.” On July 26, 1962, The Republic published another story. Sherri knew her identity couldn't stay a secret. Her name was made public when an attorney for the hospital filed a suit in Maricopa County Superior Court to clear the way for the abortion. But a hospital administrator canceled it, concerned about the legality of the procedure. The panel of doctors approved the abortion. The front-page story appeared July 23, 1962: “Pill May Cost Woman Her Baby.” In it, and in the stories that followed, Sherri was identified only as a Phoenix housewife. Her story unfolded in headlines over the next two days, not only in Arizona but around the world. Kids waited anxiously, hoping to hear Miss Sherri say their names. MORE KARINA BLAND: How a 4-year-old changed 40 livesĮach show ended with Miss Sherri peering through the open frame of her 'magic mirror' and carefully intoning, 'Romper bomper stomper boo, tell me, tell me, tell me do, magic mirror tell me today, did all my friends have fun at play?' And then she would name the children she could see in 'television land,' reciting, 'I can see Catherine and Tommy and Billy and Karen' and so on. Don't Bee demonstrated what children should not do. Do-Bee, an over-size bumblebee, taught the children proper deportment, while Mr. Miss Sherri served milk and cookies to the children on the show, with a simple prayer: 'God is great, God is good. The live show started each morning with the Pledge of Allegiance and featured lessons, songs and games. Sherri Chessen had been known to thousands of children since 1958 as Miss Sherri, the host of the Arizona edition of the nationally syndicated children’s television show 'Romper Room.” More than five decades later, her decision can still stir controversy. Few issues are more divisive, debated at dinner tables, in the highest levels of government, and in a brutal presidential campaign where a candidate talks about punishing women who end a pregnancy.īut it wasn't just the decision of a troubled mother-to-be from Scottsdale. In July of that year, she made a life-altering decision that would generate international headlines, send her halfway around the world and turn her into a symbol in a fight that had barely begun. Sherri was 30 then, married, already the mother of four and pregnant with her fifth child when she learned that a tranquilizer she had taken for morning sickness had been linked to severe birth defects. The scene took her back to the summer of 1962. After a moment, she pushed rewind and then play. Sherri picked up the remote and pressed the pause button, sobs shaking her whole body. She spoke cheerfully but couldn't look the mother in the face.

A woman had just given birth to a baby, a daughter, with deformed arms and legs. On TV was the British program “Call the Midwife,” a drama that follows the lives of a group of midwives working in the poverty-stricken East End of London. It was a Sunday night, and Sherri Chessen was watching television in her condominium in an ocean-side retirement community in La Jolla, California.

Romper room magic mirror