Dirty Dancing and Planned Parenthood: a Perfect History Lesson

dirty dancing
This showed up in my Facebook feed Thursday night and blew me away.  It may have been funny to many, but it left me breathless.

I don’t know if it’s possible for younger people today to know how terrible that time before Roe was for so many young women like Penny, who faced the terror and hopelessness of an unwanted pregnancy, or what a real miracle it was that she was rescued.

Dirty Dancing is set in the summer of 1963, just before Francis “Baby” Houseman is about to leave for Mt Holyoke.  I left only a year later, for Smith.  So she and I are cousins, if not sisters.  Each wanting to change the world, each with a wonderful, trusting father, each falling for a bad boy with such a different history from our own … and each inexperienced in realities such as those faced by a pregnant dancer with no money whose illegal abortion goes terribly wrong.

She nearly dies — saved only by the skill of Francis’ doctor father.  The film is a fairy tale – in the love story for sure, but also in the story of the damsel in distress rescued by a fatherly wizard who brings her back from the brink.  Most women in those pre-Roe days – and many again now, in states where abortion rights are savaged every day — faced real back alleys and unskilled procedures on kitchen tables with no wizard, or anyone else, to save them.  Penny’s story was as real as they come, and it’s no joke to remind us that her fairy tale is in real danger of once again becoming the dark horror story it used to be.

So yes – it’s always fun when cultural references inform reality.  But it’s hard to enjoy even this clever comparison when the lives of so many Pennys and her sisters are in such terrible jeopardy.