Dirty Dancing & the Pro-Choice Film Canon
The year is 2012. My four cousins, my sister, and I, along with our extended family are in San Fernando, California on Christmas Eve, and while we wait for the clock to strike midnight so we can open presents, we are playing the greatest video game with the greatest gaming system ever created, the Nintendo Wii. The game is Just Dance 4.
A favorite of the family, boasting songs like What Makes You Beautiful by One Direction, Super Bass by Nicki Minaj, or even Time Warp from the Rocky Horror Picture Show. A mix of modern and iconic late 20th century music made Just Dance 4 entertaining for us kids to play, and for the adults behind us to watch, laugh, and sing along to the songs they once knew. We load up I’ve Had the Time of My Life from Dirty Dancing onto the television screen, the dance complete with the iconic lift at the end that we’d all jokingly attempt, and ultimately fail to execute.
Previous to memorizing and playing I’ve Had the Time of My Life over and over again, I really had little knowledge of Dirty Dancing as anything more than the one movie other than The Outsiders that Patrick Swayze was in. I do remember the untimely death of Swayze being splattered across the covers of the magazines near the checkout at the grocery stores. And somewhere in my mother’s closet of photo albums is a photo of me posing with a wax Swayze at the Hollywood Madame Tussauds museum; him dressed as Johnny, balancing on a log (per the film’s iconic moment). All this to say, Patrick Swayze and I go way back, but me and Dirty Dancing? Not so much.
Of course, as I got older, I learned more about the significance of Dirty Dancing’s place in pop culture. Quotes like “No one puts Baby in a corner” or references to the film in TV shows like New Girl or How I Met Your Mother. Despite this breadth of knowledge that I felt I had accumulated about this movie, I still had never watched it. Not until the middle of the pandemic, when one of my best friends and I had decided to watch all of the great romantic/romantic comedy movies, did I actually watch Dirty Dancing. And it instantly flew up into the Top 5 of my favorite movies of all time. And this year it celebrates its 35th anniversary!
What’s interesting about Dirty Dancing is that it was expected to flop. A low budget film (approximately 6 million dollars) with an initial tiny theatrical release turned into a 200 million dollar (and counting) pop culture staple and mega-hit for a generation of movie-watchers and beyond.
Needless to say, Dirty Dancing is memorable for its steamy dance numbers, montages of Johnny (Swayze) and Baby’s (Jennifer Grey) budding summer romance, and of course, the lift during the closing I’ve Had the Time of My Life dance number. But as a person that watched the film when I was freshly 18 years old, instead of as a tween in the eighties, what struck me the most was the rising action of the film: Johnny’s longtime dance partner, Penny Johnson (Cynthia Rhodes), cannot attend the dance competition because it falls on the same night that her illegal abortion is to take place. This then, is what causes Baby to ask her father for money to give to Penny for the abortion (her father unaware what its for, trusting Baby), and step up to take her place in the competition, and the movie goes on.
As a Gen-Z viewer, who expected any abortion plotline pre-modern times to be treated as sinister and immoral, I was surprsied when the story around the abortion unraveled itself as it did.
Though the film itself was released in 1987, the year in which it takes place is 1963. Ten years before Roe v. Wade. Situating itself in this time period furthers the plot; it makes the stakes higher for Penny’s scheduling conflicts – this is the only time the procedure can be done, as it's an under-the-rug type of operation. Later in the film, when the unsafe operation goes awry, Baby, panicking, calls her doctor dad, Dr. Jake Houseman (Jerry Orbach), to come and help a screaming and crying Penny. As a good doctor does, he immediately clears the area and takes care of Penny, saving her life; had he not gotten there she most likely would have bled to death. While the entire situation creates a temporary rift between Baby and her father, him angry at her using his money for “something illegal,” his acute care and constant observation of Penny’s health post-operation displays a surprisingly empathetic response from this seemingly conservative man.
Neither Dr. Houseman, nor the movie’s perspective, are interested in villainizing Penny for her decision to have the abortion in the first place. In fact, the class issues that lead to the unsafe conditions in which the procedure had to happen are illuminated as the real villain of the movie: Penny can’t earn a living, or get housing from the camp if she can’t dance. She can’t dance in her and Johnny’s elaborate way if she’s pregnant. So, if she’s pregnant, she can’t earn a living or find housing. Similarly, the class differences between Johnny and Baby drive their story together, the classic we-can-never-be-together-because-I’m-not-from-your-world-and-vice-versa plot. Though the extreme intricacies of class issues are inexplicable through a 100 minute romantic dance movie, it does a good job at situating how class especially affects different sectors of personal relationships.
I’d go as far as to say that Dirty Dancing is kind of a milestone achievement in the canon of films that portray women’s decisions and rights to their bodies? I cannot think of another movie that is as huge in popular culture that depicts abortion and the women who choose to do so in a very human and real way in the time that it was made.
And while I recognize that reproductive rights are not exclusive to women and extend to trans and nonbinary people with the ability to become pregnant, for the purposes of this article, due to a film canon that almost exclusively portrays abortion as a cisgender women’s health issue, I will be focusing on statistics, citations, and media that pertains to ciswomen. (If anything, the lack of research and media portrayal shows that the mainstream conversation about reproductive rights within the trans and nonbinary community is very little to none, and I’d love for it to be a more explored topic in the future of media and academia alike)
In 1987, the year Dirty Dancing released, about 1.6 million women had a safe abortion in the United States thanks to 1973’s Roe v. Wade case; though only about 50% of metropolitan areas and just below 10% of suburban and rural areas had providers of abortion services in their locale. So while Roe was a champion for reproductive rights, it didn’t entirely create equal access to those health services. Dirty Dancing forces audiences to not only reconcile with the extremities that women pre-Roe had to go to for access to safe, and unsafe, abortion procedures, but to ponder how much progress had really been made since then.
After a recent rewatch of the film with my cross-country best friend via Zoom, I began to really think about media that I’ve seen that depicted abortion and the realities of access to safe ones in the same empathetic and realistic way that Dirty Dancing does. But nothing really came to mind. Was I just not updated on any of the abortion-plot movies that existed or were there not very many that made it into mainstream popular culture? Upon this realization, I did a little bit of digging.
What I found is that no, there aren’t really any mainstream films as huge and culture defining as Dirty Dancing that portray abortion, but there are plenty of non-blockbuster films that tell stories, both painful and nonchalant, about abortion.
In 1996, almost a decade after Dirty Dancing, a made-for-television movie premiered on HBO entitled If These Walls Could Talk. Starring Demi Moore, Sissy Spacek, and Cher, the film uses an anthology format to follow the story of three different women whose lives are disrupted with unplanned pregnancies. Each of the three segments takes place ten years apart, beginning in 1952, to 1974, and 1996. By positioning each story in a different time period, the film demonstrates societies view of abortion; the course of action each of the women contemplates; in their respective decades.
While the opening credits roll, scenes of real protests for and against abortion flood the screen; signs referencing the landmark Roe v Wade case (My life, my choice and Make babies not corpses being two standouts at opposite ends of the spectrum). What appears to be a twenty something women getting interviewed by a reporter exclaims, rather matter-of-factly into the camera, “Listen honey, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.”
The first segment brings us to 1952, and to put it shortly: a nurse named Claire Donnelly (Demi Moore) that had sex with her recently dead husband’s brother is desperately seeking out any person at all who will perform an abortion. Unable to provide the money to fly to Puerto Rico for a safe procedure, Claire hosts a sketchy, rude man at her house who performs the abortion with unclean instruments, and she, unfortunately, hemorrages and bleeds to death shortly after.
The story of Claire Donnelly is home to what I’d call the most haunting scene in the entire film: at a low moment where there is little to no hope for a distraught Claire, she attempts to give herself a botched abortion via a random metal stick lying in her bathroom. There are screams of agony, of pain, as she proceeds to insert the rod into her body. It's a very difficult scene to watch; I winced profusely, looking at the screen through fingers covering my eyes. More than anything, once I snapped back to reality, the scene that had just unfolded in front of me made me angry.
In the 1950s, American women weren’t even allowed to have their own bank account, let alone a life that wasn’t in line with the notion of a “nuclear family” without being frowned upon (of course, this was a white American idea). The absence of choice for women in situations like Claire, with unwanted pregnancies, forced desperate, unsafe lengths for those that were not wealthy enough, or otherwise unable to find access to safe, yet still illegal, abortion procedures. It’s angering to think about all of the fatalities that could have avoided had there been access to safe procedures; because as this film, and history, has shown us, there will always be abortions, but whether they are safe or not is what makes a myriad of difference. The tragedy of this first segment emphasizes the horrors that follow unsafe procedures, and the bleak outcome that lack of choice ultimately leads to.
It’s now 1974, one year after Roe v. Wade. The second segment follows a visibly exhausted mother-of-four named Barbara Barrows (Sissy Spacek) who finds out she is pregnant, and is caught by her eldest daughter inspecting a pamphlet with information about abortion procedures. Her daughter notices, is supportive, and alerts her mother about some clinics that she knows performs such procedures. With reluctance, due to a conservative husband, and despite the prospects of a new child making out-of-state university impossible for their eldest, Ms. Barrows ultimately decides to have the baby; her eldest now resenting her for her future being the collateral damage to her parents’ “mistake.”
The calmest story of the three, this tale is more so about (1) having the right to choose, and (2) doing with that what you may. Ultimately, Barbara decides to keep the child, and while that decision had a lot to do with her husband, moments of hesitance when alone throughout the segment infer that there was an emotional difficulty that Barbara herself was grappling with.
This goes to show that it is entirely possible to support safe access to reproductive rights for all while acknowledging that such procedures are emotional in a lot of ways for some who may consider the option. Like any major life decision, abortion can be a massive emotinal process, so in situations like that with Barbara, her considering her options, but ultimately deciding to keep her child, surmises that she simply knows herself, and what she emotionally can or cannot handle. And that is okay too. Unfortunately, it comes at the expense of furthering her existing family’s financial strains, but deciding to choose what feels right for her is another part of what is important about the right to choose in the first place.
The third and final segment, taking place in 1996, the year in which the film was released, is the most shocking of the three. Directed by Cher herself, the story follows a college-aged woman, Christine (Anne Heche), who becomes pregnant by her married professor; and when he finds out, he gives her an envelope of cash to “take care of it,” i.e. to get an abortion. What differs Christine from the two previous protagonists is her and her best friend Patti’s (Jada Pinket Smith) moral objection to abortion. Patti exclaims, angrily, that Christine will be “on her own” if she aborts the child.
Despite all of this, a scared Christine journeys to a local abortion clinic, but upon arrival is met with a crowd of Catholic, anti-abortion protestors who convince her to skip the procedure. Days later, Christine returns to the clinic with Patti, who, though morally opposed, goes to support her friend. With a huge crowd still protesting outside the doors of the clinic – bibles in hand, a manequin of the Grim Reaper with ABORTION written across its chest, and shouts of passionate opposition – Patti argues with a nurse while Christine has a safe procedure performed by none other than Cher herself, playing Dr. Beth Thompson. In a shocking, third-act turn of events, an unnamed protestor (Matthew Lillard) suddenly enters the operation room and shoots every doctor in the room, killing Dr. Cher, but saving Christine who is screaming on the table, Lillard exclaiming that he “didn’t mean” to hurt her.
I was stunned, to say the least. The segment utilizes this insane, completely unexpected shock value. It was just so outrageously out of the blue that it was unfortunately laughable, even. Despite the pastiche of the last 4 minutes, the message was clear: anti-abortion rhetoric turned anti-abortion laws literally kills; forcing unsafe procedures where women risk their lives.
But the shock factor must have worked for the various television academies, as the HBO television film went on to not only become the highest rated HBO project of its time, but also, went on to receive Emmy, Golden Globe, Satellite, and NAACP award nominations, including Outstanding Made for Television Movie.
So there was this critically acclaimed television movie about societies’ views of abortions in different decades of American history. What does this have to do with Dirty Dancing?
The film debuted almost ten years after Dirty Dancing’s theatrical release and subsequent success; and regardless of its made-for-TV status, it was still incredibly difficult for If These Walls Could Talk to be greenlit for production.
In an interview, Cher revealed that it took “someone with Demi [Moore]’s power and fortitude to have something like this made. Without that power, you couldn’t do it. These topics are not on everybody’s top 10 list of things to do.”
Moore had to really fight to have the film made and distributed, bouncing the film around to different networks before HBO finally signed onto the project, too many fearing political backlash. As journalist Tom Jicha said of the film in a 1996 review, the “movie’s tone is not persuasive; it is confrontational.” Though he writes this backhandedly, I’d argue that this is one of its biggest strengths. It's not afraid to be exactly what it is.
Though I was not shocked to learn that a film such as If These Walls Could Talk was controversial to produce, I was shocked to learn that a TV-movie was that difficult to make in a post-Dirty Dancing world. Did the general public just completely forget about their collective favorite movie not even 10 years ago?
But, alas, it makes sense. Walls was infinitely more explicit in its view and its abortion subject matter than Dirty Dancing. Where Dirty Dancing was a dance-romance with abortion sprinkled in, If These Walls Could Talk is, really, only, about abortion. Maybe family dynamics, politics, and society, too, but ultimately how all of those things are impacted by, and impact, reproductive rights. Even though there was critical acclaim for Walls in its awards season, I’m sad to say that from a Gen-Z perspective, almost three decades later, it pretty much has been lost in the void of niche pop culture; buried until one goes searching for it.
Speaking of buried pop culture gems, after watching these two 20th century films, I wondered what the portrayal of abortion plotlines looked like in more “modern” times, like the last ten years, and I found a rather delightful, 2014 romantic comedy-adjacent film starring Jenny Slate entitled Obvious Child.
The film follows Brooklyn-based stand-up comedian Donna (Slate) who, after a drunken one-night stand with a graduate student named Max (Jake Lacy), gets pregnant and decides to have an abortion. Pre-existing tensions with her mother, and a dwindling belief in love after a breakup that opens the film, centers the plot on Donna’s emotional growth rather than on a “will she or won’t she” abortion plot. We follow her journey to overcoming a fear of emotional closeness in relationships; shown through her back and forth in deciding how to inform the father of the child, Max, that she has even become pregnant in the first place. Because as soon as she finds out she’s pregnant, she has decided she is going to have an abortion, and there’s no ethical dilemma that plagues the protagonist. It just is.
Its refreshing, even, to see an “abortion story” that isn’t centered around tragedy, but around choice, around support, around comedy, around family. Around love.
Obvious Child is a modern piece that is able to keep a lighthearted, normal tone while raising the issues that still circumscribe the accessibility of reproductive health care. Donna cries in a clinic because the procedure costs as much as her month’s rent; and while the doctor points her to some resources for financial help that she may qualify for; it's still a rude, despondent awakening for viewers of the film, reminded that accessibility, especially amongst different economic classes, is nevertheless an ongoing issue in the 21st century.
The film also briefly touches on this taboo that abortion has found itself as in society. Thinking back to Dirty Dancing, even though I crown the film as a milestone achievement in the portrayal of reproductive health care; there is an apprehension in the vagueness of the script in even addressing the word abortion itself. It never appears in the film; and while there are scenes, as previously discussed, strongly inferring the events that are taking place with Penny and her procedure, the hesitance to even say the word shows the effects of the taboo in a film, in the eighties nonetheless, that strongly supports the women’s right to choose.
Obvious Child is able to reconcile what Dirty Dancing was not by explicitly working to do away with this taboo. In the third act of the film, while alerting her mother of her pregnancy and impending abortion, our protagonist discovers that her mom, too, had an abortion in college. And this is the first she is hearing of it. This “confession” of shared experience is an emotional resolution for a rather tumultuous relationship that Donna and her mother had maintained throughout the film; they feel more connected to each other after letting go of the notion of abortion as an “unspoken” idea; once again, contributing to a normalization, and destigmatization of abortion and coversations about it.
As well as creating some cute moments, like Max accompanying Donna to the clinic for the procedure, and little dinner dates here and there; this film, in my perspective, sets a quality example of how modern conversations and portrayals of abortion can, and should, be in media.
It's a contemporary movie that works to erase the abortion “taboo” and its conversations about the accesibility of abortion, still, is relevant considering Roe v. Wade's verdict is constantly on the line. For example, the Texas law, Senate Bill 8 (SB 8) that bans abortion around six weeks of pregnancy – before most people even are aware that they are pregnant. This goes completely against Roe, yet it wasn’t challenged by the Supreme Court in 2021. Laws are floating around constantly, seeking to go directly against legal precedent set by Roe v. Wade. And as history has foretold, banning abortion doesn’t stop all abortions – it stops all safe abortions. It prevents safe access to reproductive care. And right now, six out of nine Supreme Court Justices have a history of anti-abortion stances, creating an uneasy terrain for the possibility of a reversal of the verdict of Roe v. Wade.
And that is why it is important to tell these stories. And to tell them in ways that show where we’ve been, where we are now, and how we could be. Because these rights, despite the tumultuous journey that they’ve been through in the past century, are still on the line. Portraying stories of abortion in realistic ways, complete with the many struggles, the not-so-many struggles, the happiness, the sadness, the anger, or the relief that can come with it services society at large – because media matters. Pop culture matters. We bury our lives into books, into television screens, into movie theaters, into our computers, and what we see has some sort of impact on how we see real life. And if we can see a scripted world, built in 100 minutes, with some attractive dancers, cool dance numbers, eighties hair, and a girl who just needs help, with an empathetic doctor who cares for her safety, then hopefully we can carry some of that same empathy into our hearts and minds for the people around us.
