‘Dirty Dancing’s backyard abortion subplot is more relevant than ever
Dirty Dancing is regarded as one of the greatest films to come out of the 80s, thanks to its iconic soundtrack and Patrick Swayze’s loins, which were singlehandedly responsible for the sexual awakening of a generation. If you saw the film as teenager — probably at a sleepover like so many of us Millennials — you would’ve been swept away by the romance between two star-crossed lovers: a young woman, Baby (Jennifer Grey), on summer vacation with her family in the Catskills and Johnny Castle (Swayze), the resort’s oh-so-sexy dance instructor.
What is often overlooked when reminiscing about this indisputable classic is its social commentary. There are references to the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement, and in the wake of renewed debate over Roe v Wade, the film’s staunch pro-choice message is more relevant than ever: An unwanted pregnancy and botched back-alley abortion is the catalyst to bringing Johnny and Baby together.
What happens in Dirty Dancing?
The film is set in the summer of 1963. “Before President Kennedy was shot, before The Beatles came, when I couldn’t wait to join the Peace Corps,” Baby narrates in the opening.
From the family’s dialogue in these first five minutes, it’s clear they’re progressives, albeit socially modest. It’s not a tragedy that Baby’s sister Lisa didn’t bring her coral shoes among nine other pairs, their father Dr. Jake Houseman says, a real tragedy is “police dogs used in Birmingham”, in reference to nonviolent civil rights protestors being attacked by police dogs in Birmingham Alabama. “Monks burning themselves in protest,” Baby adds, referring to the Vietnamese monk Thích Quảng Đức, who set himself alight in opposition to the persecution of Buddhists by the country’s Catholic president, Ngo Dinh Diem.
As one of the many planned activities at the resort, the family take a dance class which is where we’re introduced to Penny, a Rockette. When Penny falls pregnant, “knocked up by Robbie the creep,” she needs $250 for an abortion, a procedure which was in 1963 was still illegal in the state of New York but nonetheless sought out and performed at great risk sometimes by legitimate doctors, other times by backyard butchers with ulterior motives. (New York would legalize abortion three years before Roe v Wade in 1970, and the state became a safe haven for women wealthy enough to make the trip.)
Many women were at the mercy of these incompetent practitioners. Infection, chronic pain, and death were common due to the use of unsanitary equipment, botched, and even self-induced abortions. Indeed, one public hospital in Chicago had an entire ward for women suffering complications from illegal abortions. It was often full.
The next time we see Penny, she is pale, writhing in pain and lying in a bed of blood-stained sheets. Penny was given no anesthetic, just “a dirty knife and a folding table. I could hear her screaming in the hallway,” says the character who accompanied her. Dirty Dancing’s writer Eleanor Bergstein made no apologies for how the film portrayed this horrific and life-threatening experience. In an interview with VICE in 2017, she said she had a doctor on set to ensure the description of illegal abortion was accurate.
“I left the abortion in through a lot of pushback from everybody, and when it came time to shoot it, I made it very clear that we would leave in what is, for me, very purple language,” said Bergstein.
14 years prior to the film’s release, in 1973, the landmark Supreme Court ruling known as Roe v Wade was passed. With a 7–2 decision, the Court deemed that the right to privacy protected a woman’s right to choose whether to have an abortion. But even then, Bergstein was aware of how fragile the Court’s ruling was: “When I made the movie in 1987, about 1963, I put in the illegal abortion and everyone said, ‘Why? There was Roe vs. Wade — what are you doing this for?” I said, ‘Well, I don’t know that we will always have Roe vs. Wade’.”
Why it’s relevant now
In a draft opinion leaked to Politico on Tuesday, it seems the days of Roe v Wade are indeed numbered as Bergstein feared. If overturned, it would end half-century of guaranteed reproductive rights under federal law. Some state’s laws concerning abortion access won’t change, but 18 are ready to pull the trigger on laws banning the procedure almost entirely.
Though the decision is not finalized, countless pro-choice advocates fear that, if passed, it will push abortion underground once more and create life-threatening circumstances for women to end their pregnancy, just like Penny in Dirty Dancing. The abortion underground is already preparing for it, as an article for The Atlantic reports, with simple DIY abortion devices that “like a cross between an at-home beer-brewing kit and a seventh-grade science experiment”.
But as the World Health Organization says: “Evidence shows that restricting access to abortions does not reduce the number of abortions; however, it does affect whether the abortions that women and girls attain are safe.”
