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.

My Miscarriage: Memories that Don’t Fade

A Lost Possibility: Women on Miscarriage - from The Nib
A Lost Possibility: Women on Miscarriage – by Ryan Alexander-Tanner, from The Nib

NOTE: In a newsletter,  Nona Willis Aronowitz posted two stories about miscarriages.  As I began to respond, this emerged:

My sons are 40 and 35.  Between them I had a miscarriage.  She was a girl.  It was the first day I had told anyone I was pregnant and begun wearing maternity clothes.

It happened on Election Night 1978 and I was in the studio producing the “house desk” results.

When the pain got serious I raced home, lost most of the fetus in the bathroom, and called our OB.  We went immediately to the hospital; in the morning I had a D and C.   It was devastating.

Then came the reaction:
VP of News:  You work too hard.
Secretary to Pres of News:  What were you doing working all night?  Didn’t you want this baby?

On the other hand, I also got notes from people ranging from my aunt to a colleague, all with the same message:  “I’ve never told anyone before but I had a miscarriage (anywhere from 1 to 30) years ago.”  The pain for each was still real.

I was lucky though.  My OB was from Czechoslovakia.   He had a real (maybe European, maybe Socialist, maybe just father of daughters) respect for professional women and, as he had been in my first pregnancy was wonderfully supportive.  He ran a cell test to determine whether there was a distinguishable cause (there was – a serious genetic issue – although we didn’t learn that for months, it has been a comfort.)  He explained the D and C, urged us to take time to grieve but also reminded us that we were far from finished with efforts to have more kids, kept me in the hospital an extra day so I could pull myself together before I went home and had to tell our nearly-three-year-old son.

He wanted to know where the baby went.  I just couldn’t handle a literal answer so even though I wasn’t at that time religious at all I told him the baby was with God.  I needed him to understand that she was somewhere where she would be as loved as he was on 79th and Broadway.

Several years later when I worked at TODAY, with the support of our Executive Producer,  I produced a series about miscarriages.  The narrator was an OB himself, one of the TODAY stable of experts.  I’m not naming him because this is what he told me (to his credit:)   “Thank you so much for doing this series with me.  I’ve been an OB for 25 years and I never realized the pain that this causes women.”  Seriously.  I was grateful that he was emotionally available to admit this but can you imagine?  Never realized.

One more thing – partners are NOT sufficiently supported when this happens. They need FAR more attention than they usually receive.  My husband has said for years that he wished we could have had a funeral or some sort of service so he too could have a vehicle to grieve.

NONA thank you so much for raising this and for the links to those powerful pieces.  The graphic one was particularly evocative as it reminded me of small moments I’d forgotten.

For the record – our second son was born 2 years later.  Both my boys are fabulous men and exquisite spouses and dads.  I am grateful for them both and the sorrow of our loss is not in any way linked to how I define my unambiguous and grateful love of them.

Even so – the fact that, 32 years later, the silence and shame and insensitivity remains is a travesty.  Please share this with doctors, nurses, midwives, preschool teachers and others who are on the “front lines.”  Maybe we can help to break the chain.,