Back in the mid Eighties, a woman named Eleanor Bergstein wrote a movie warning young women what would happen to them if their right to abortion was taken away. “It seemed to me that women in the Eighties no longer cared so much about this stuff, so I set the film in the Sixties to show them how recently in America abortion was banned,” she told me when we spoke a few years ago. That film was Dirty Dancing, and when most people think of that movie they think of Baby (Jennifer Grey, obviously) carrying a watermelon and Johnny (Patrick Swayze, double obviously) holding her above his head on the dancefloor.
But smuggled in amid what Bergstein calls “the fun stuff” is the bloody heart of the film: the white working-class character Penny (Cynthia Rhodes), who has to have an illegal abortion. After being taken to a “butcher” with a “dirty knife” and a “folding table” — Bergstein made sure to included graphic language in the film — she nearly dies, screaming in agony. She doesn’t, but Bergstein had to fight hard to keep the Penny plot in the movie when the studio wanted to remove it: “It had to be in the movie because I could see young women were taking the rights for granted and I wanted to show them what life really could be like in the US.”
They may well be about to find out for themselves. I happen to be in the US this week and waking up to news that a leaked draft shows the US Supreme Court has provisionally voted to overturn Roe v Wade, felt strangely similar to another morning six years ago, when I woke up to learn that Donald Trump was now my president. Suddenly, on both mornings, I was in the land of the unimaginable, a development that was, really, all too foreseeable.
It seems probable that the leak, which will likely be investigated by the FBI, was from a young liberal or conservative clerk working in the court, hoping to excite their bases in the midterms. So reacting to it runs the risk of letting the tail wag the dog: it was done to incite, and incited we all are. And yet. Anyone who cares about women’s rights can’t help but react to it, and getting this confirmed insight into how close American women are to losing their autonomy should shock everyone.
Roe v Wade was always fragile, and, especially in recent years, Republicans have forged an identity out of railing against it. It is stunning to remember now that the party once supported abortion rights, including Gerald Ford and, as governor of California, Ronald Reagan. Justice Harry Blackmun, who was appointed by the unquestionably Republican Richard Nixon, wrote the majority opinion for Roe v Wade. Today, the conservative takeover of the Supreme Court was largely done with the aim of overturning of Roe v Wade. Democrats can and should rail against how nutty the Republican Party has become in the past four decades, especially on social issues like abortion. But they can’t pretend the Republicans ever hid who they are. This has all happened in the open sunlight.
And yet, despite that, too many took women’s bodily rights too much for granted for too long. I don’t exclude myself here. I consider myself a full-throated and wised-up supporter of abortion, but I look back on, for example, my admiration for Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her stubborn refusal to make way for a younger justice, who would have been appointed by President Obama, and I cringe at my short-sightedness. Yeah, you go, Girlboss! Gimme more of those photos of you working out with your personal trainer! Ginsburg was a remarkable figure, but by working until she died, and thereby allowing Trump to appoint his third justice, she imperilled so many of the rights she fought for, and that is a tragedy.