--- title: How a German Measles Epidemic Stirred Up the Abortion Debate in 1965 description: A group of doctors defied the law to terminate the pregnancies of women exposed to rubella, stoking the already contentious abortion debate. canonical: https://time.com/3692652/measles-abortion-1960s/ author: Eliza Berman article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2015-02-02T21:20:28.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-05-11T05:05:54.075Z og:title: How a German Measles Epidemic Stoked the Abortion Debate in 1965 og:description: A group of doctors defied the law to terminate the pregnancies of women exposed to rubella, stoking the already contentious abortion debate. og:url: https://time.com/3692652/measles-abortion-1960s/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt2d36adb4ad79b689/69877d363c163922774518b4/measles-02.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1536 og:image:height: 864 og:image:alt: 00835963.JPG og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: How a German Measles Epidemic Stoked the Abortion Debate in 1965 twitter:description: A group of doctors defied the law to terminate the pregnancies of women exposed to rubella, stoking the already contentious abortion debate. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt2d36adb4ad79b689/69877d363c163922774518b4/measles-02.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # How a German Measles Epidemic Stoked the Abortion Debate in 1965 > Sponsored content. 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Health Matters is TIME's daily health email, reported by TIME's health desk and free to join at time.com/newsletters. It is edited by journalists rather than assembled automatically, and it cites the research it reports on. #### Is Health Matters free? Yes. Health Matters is a free daily newsletter from TIME, available at time.com/newsletters. #### Who reads TIME's Health Matters newsletter? Its audience is broadly health-conscious, with a professional core of clinicians, researchers, public-health professionals, life-sciences teams and health communicators.  by [Eliza Berman](https://time.com/author/eliza-berman/)  ## Eliza Berman Berman is a senior editor at TIME. Feb 2, 2015 9:20 PM UTC  4 month old baby girl with eye and ear defects because mother had German Measles. 4 month old baby girl with eye and ear defects because mother had German Measles. HENRY GROSKINSKY—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images  by [Eliza Berman](https://time.com/author/eliza-berman/)  ## Eliza Berman Berman is a senior editor at TIME. Feb 2, 2015 9:20 PM UTC Fifteen years after the U.S. declared the measles eliminated, a [growing outbreak](http://time.com/3692276/measles-numbers-cdc/) has many up in arms about the risks posed to public health by parents who choose not to vaccinate their children. Fifty years ago, the debate centered not on _whether_ to vaccinate babies, but whether a pregnant woman infected with the virus should be able to decide whether to _have_ the baby in the first place. The year was 1965\. A growing movement calling for legalized abortion would declare victory with _Roe v. Wade_ eight years later, but until then, women seeking abortions would either be denied or undergo the procedure in secrecy. A small number of doctors, however, chose to deliberately defy the law and perform abortions on women whose fetuses had been exposed to the German measles, also known as rubella.  Life Magazine The year before, an outbreak of rubella had spread across the East Coast, Midwest and South. When it reached California during the spring of 1965, [LIFE Magazine](https://books.google.com/books?id=8VIEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA3&dq=) assigned reporter Bob Liang and photographer Co Rentmeester to investigate reports that “reputable doctors in reputable hospitals” were performing abortions on women infected with rubella during the early stages of their pregnancies. After being turned away from every obstetrician in the Los Angeles phone book, Liang found Keith Russell, head of the California Obstetricians Society and a doctor with an interest in reforming abortion laws. Russell led Liang to the hospital where he would encounter Dolores Stonebreaker, a pregnant woman who had contracted rubella from her 12-year-old son. After weighing the advice of her husband and doctor — and the vague guidance of her Roman Catholic priest, who would later reproach her for murder — Stonebreaker was preparing to terminate her pregnancy on the 50-50 chance that her baby would be born with “mental retardation, heart defects, blindness, deafness, disease of the bone and blood abnormalities.” Stonebreaker’s infection had manifested in a rash, but many pregnant women exhibited no symptoms, leading to a majority of “German measles babies” — 9 out of 10 — born to mothers who had been unaware of their infections. To address this, doctors developed a blood test for pregnant women, who could find out whether they had been infected even if a subsequent decision to terminate the pregnancy could only be made illegally. A rubella [vaccine](http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,844873,00.html) was only five years away, and the combined measles, mumps, rubella vaccine would emerge in the early 1970s. But the questions the virus raised with regard to abortion added fuel to a fire already stoked by cases like that of Sherri Finkbine, who traveled to Sweden in 1962 to terminate a pregnancy after learning that pills she had been taking contained [Thalidomide](http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/druginfo/meds/a699032.html). Although staunch opponents, including many Catholic clerics, [argued](http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,837369-5,00.html) that terminating a pregnancy with a chance of birth defects could “doom a possibly perfect baby in the process,” public sympathy for some women seeking abortions — like Stonebreaker and Finkbine — was also spreading. By 1968, four states had passed laws allowing women to terminate a pregnancy if, as [TIME reported](http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,723867,00.html) then, “the child is likely to be born defective, as is commonly the case if the mother has had German measles (rubella) within the first three months of pregnancy.” Russell, the doctor who led Liang and Rentmeester to their story, would become a leader among others in the medical community who believed in therapeutic abortion and, more broadly, in a woman’s right to make those decisions privately with her doctor. When Liang reported back to LIFE’s editor in chief about the assignment, he lauded Stonebreaker’s doctor — the one Russell had led him to — as “a brave man.” Despite the risks to his career and reputation, “he dared to stick his neck out for something he believed in.” ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/3692652/measles-abortion-1960s/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/3692652/measles-abortion-1960s/"},"headline":"How a German Measles Epidemic Stoked the Abortion Debate in 1965","datePublished":"2015-02-02T21:20:28.000Z","dateModified":"2026-05-11T05:05:54.075Z","description":"When doctors discovered the health risks to babies born to infected mothers, the virus became another front in the battle for abortion rights","url":"https://time.com/3692652/measles-abortion-1960s/","keywords":["health","abortion","photography","Infectious Disease","Vaccines","measles","anti-vaxxers"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt2d36adb4ad79b689/69877d363c163922774518b4/measles-02.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Eliza Berman","jobTitle":"Berman is a senior editor at TIME.","url":"https://time.com/author/eliza-berman/"}],"articleSection":"","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt2d36adb4ad79b689/69877d363c163922774518b4/measles-02.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"00835963.JPG","caption":"00835963.JPG","creditText":"HENRY GROSKINSKY—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/tag/health/","name":"health"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/3692652/measles-abortion-1960s/","name":"How a German Measles Epidemic Stoked the Abortion Debate in 1965"}}]}] ```