PENNY’S ABORTION
In Dirty Dancing, the movie I watch every day over the summer holidays, whose dialogue I recite and whose dance moves I practice until I am more sweat than girl, Penny has to have an abortion because she will lose her job if management find out she is pregnant. But the “doctor” she goes to is a “butcher with a folding table and a dirty knife”, who uses no anaesthetic and sends Penny away doubled over in pain and gushing with blood. Only the fast intervention of Dr Houseman, summoned by his daughter Baby, saves Penny’s life.
A friend’s mum, watching the movie with us one afternoon, pauses it to give us a lecture about how bad things were when abortion was illegal. My friend and I giggle because what else are you meant to do when an adult talks earnestly about uterine injuries and wire shoved up vaginas? But in bed that night I think about what she said: it happened to Penny because the law was brutal. She hadn’t done anything wrong. And since the law now was better, if I ever did that same thing that wasn’t wrong, I wouldn’t have to face the dirty knife, the folding table, the butcher.
Still, it’s cool that abortion is safer now but why does it need to be? How dumb do you have to be to get pregnant in this day and age when you can get condoms for two bucks from vending machines? I’ve practised how to say, “If it’s not on, it’s not on,” so it sounds sexily ironic, but so the boy knows I totally mean it.
I will never be like Baby, who, moments after leaving haemorrhaging Penny, runs and seduces Johnny Castle without a moment’s pause to talk about, let alone procure, contraception. If seeing a woman almost die from the consequences of unprotected sex doesn’t slow her roll, well, maybe Baby isn’t quite as clever as the movie keeps telling us she is.
Very soon after, I discover I’m not so clever either. Or I am, and Baby is, but when you’ve got hungry eyes and a feelin’ that won’t subside, well, you could be in the middle of a goddamn maternity ward and it’d seem like all those screaming women and bawling babies had nothing at all to do with the magic happening between you and your Johnny.