‘Dirty Dancing’ Is a Movie About Abortion

Amidst the dancing and romance, the surprise 1987 hit depicts the perils and restrictions of pre-Roe America. Its frankness made it an outlier then — but also now.

Last Friday, Jennifer Grey appeared on The View to promote her new memoir, Out of the Corner, but also discussed abortion and the recently leaked draft of a Supreme Court opinion that will likely overturn Roe v. Wade. The conversation didn’t have to veer away from Grey’s work to make the connection. Her book’s title is taken from her most famous role, Frances “Baby” Houseman, a teenager whose 1963 Catskills summer vacation includes romance, dancing, and witnessing firsthand the horrors that can happen when abortion is illegal. As Decider captured in its round-up of responses to the appearance, this confused some View viewers, who seemingly didn’t remember or realize that abortion factored into the movie at all. 

In some respects, this isn’t that surprising. Even beloved movies tend to get reduced in the cultural memory to a couple of elements, and with Dirty Dancing it’s Patrick Swayze’s Johnny Castle wearing a bicep-bearing black tank top, Baby (finally) getting the lift right, a soundtrack that mixes oldies with hits made inescapable in the late-’80s by the film’s success, the pervasive, sweaty carnal energy generated between its leads, and not much more. But it’s Johnny’s first dance partner Penny’s (Cynthia Rhodes) unexpected pregnancy and subsequent botched abortion that drives the plot, pushing Baby into Johnny’s arms when Penny can no longer perform.

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But a few confused tweets shouldn’t be confused for the impact of the film’s abortion elements. Penny’s sidelining is anything but a convenient plot device. Her storyline plays out in great, often excruciating detail. We get to know Robbie (Max Cantor), the Yale med student who’s spending the summer working as a waiter and who refuses to take responsibility for getting her pregnant and has no reason to expect he’ll have to. He’s only visiting this working class milieu. He won’t be staying. (Robbie’s also an Ayn Rand enthusiast.) We also get a chilling description of the abortion — a thing of dirty knives and folding tables — and a graphic depiction of its nearly deadly after effects as Penny suffers until Baby’s father (Jerry Orbach) saves her life.

None of this is marginal and that, per screenwriter Eleanor Bergstein, is very much by design and with a persuasive purpose. Speaking this year to the Greenwich International Film Festival, Bergstein said:

“[Y]ou can make a brilliant black and white documentary [about] abortion and everyone who sees it probably agrees with you before the first frame. But if you make a movie in color with pretty people and music and sensual dancing and a beautiful blonde young girl with a face like a delicate princess having no choices and screaming in a hallway under a dirty knife — maybe you’ll change somebody’s mind about what they assumed before.”

That outlawing abortion would end abortion is one of those assumptions. That abortion should be a matter dictated by the state and not a personal decision is another. Dirty Dancing is Baby’s story, but it’s Penny’s, too, the story of a woman caught in a trap who sees no way out but putting her life in the hands of a stranger.

Dirty Dancing’s abortion subplot made it a rarity for a big hit movie in 1987–or at any time (to say nothing of a PG-13-rated film that would become a generations-spanning sleepover classic). Movies like Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which hit theaters five years earlier, proved that mainstream films could depict abortions with complexity and nuance but, if anything, Hollywood has only gotten shier about the topic in the decades since. It’s central to The Cider House Rules, another tale set in pre-Roe America. More often, however, movies shift away from the topic, even when their plots make the matter unavoidable. Juno and Knocked Up, for instance, acknowledge their protagonists have the choice to terminate a pregnancy (even if Knocked Up never says the word and makes a joke of its characters’ inability to say it), then have them choose not to. 

Admittedly, these are movies about pregnancy and giving birth that would have nowhere to go if their characters exercised their right to terminate a pregnancy, but there aren’t a lot of counterexamples. The exceptions tend to be a handful of indie movies from Citizen Ruth to Obvious Child to, more recently, films about the difficulty of obtaining an abortion in an America in the process of rolling back rights, like Never Really Sometimes Always, Grandma, and Unpregnant. (There are also, of course, fundamentalist films addressing the issue from the other side.) 

It’s heartening when a film like Natalie Morales’ Plan B, from 2021, can fold the topic of reproductive rights into a mainstream-friendly package, in this case a winning (and raunchy) teen comedy in which Sunny (Kuhoo Verma) and Lupe (Victoria Moroles) a pair of South Dakota teens, look for a morning-after pill after Sunny has an awkward and unexpected sexual encounter. Over the course of their frantic search they bond, get into trouble, and reveal secrets they’ve never told each other. But it’s restrictions that determine the course of the journey, be it a (male) pharmacist who exercises his right not to provide birth control and cheerfully adds, “Honestly, it really helps me sleep at night!” or the empty hallways of their best hope, the Planned Parenthood center in Rapid City, which they discover is no longer operating (just like the actual Rapid City Planned Parenthood, which closed in 2014).

But Plan B didn’t pack audiences into theaters like Dirty Dancing. It didn’t have the chance. Though Plan B might have found an appreciative theatrical audience in an era before franchises pushed virtually every other sort of film out of multiplexes, it debuted, quietly, on Hulu, sure to find some viewers but destined never to start a wider cultural conversation. But, to be fair, that conversation wasn’t often started in multiplexes in an era with more varied offerings, either. For as long as abortion has been legal, studio movies have largely been happy to act as if it doesn’t exist, no matter how common the procedure has been. 

Now, as that legality seems certain to end in many states, a glossy film about love and dancing that also depicts the consequences of laws against abortion looks more exceptional, and subversive, than ever, even if it wasn’t necessarily treated that way at the time. A scan of contemporaneous movie reviews reveals that the film’s abortion plotline was mostly spoken of matter of factly as part of the plot description, when mentioned at all. (Though the Charlotte Observer’s JoAnn Rhetts did single it out as the worst part of a “dumb” screenplay.) In retrospect, Dirty Dancing was released in the heart of a moment when abortion, though far from a settled issue in the minds of many, felt protected by court decisions and a general desire not to turn back the clock to when a woman in need of an abortion might have no recourse but to seek the services of, in Baby’s dad’s words, “some butcher” to end a pregnancy–and then face legal consequences when the butcher did a butcher’s work. In 1987 it felt like a depiction of how far we’d come since 1963. In 2022, it now looks like a warning about how progress can be ripped away, and how little creating a movie world in which abortion rarely seemed to exist at all has helped.