Can Baby Get Us Out of Our Intractable Abortion Corner?

T he title of Jennifer Grey’s recent memoir, Out of the Corner, is a play on the famous line from the late Patrick Swayze’s character in the movie they are both best known for, Dirty Dancing. Her character was nicknamed “Baby,” and he said, “No one puts Baby in a corner” to her family, who did just that. Of course, if you are a Generation Xer or older, I may not have to tell you this. The soundtrack roped many of us in.

It’s probably not shocking that Grey is speaking out in favor of legal abortion. The movie, after all, had a storyline about a botched illegal abortion. Grey considers the movie “feminist” in that way. She was so upset the day that SCOTUS overturned Roe v. Wade that she considered canceling a scheduled interview with the Los Angeles Times. But it’s what she said that might actually help get us out of the corner into which Roe v. Wade forced our discussions about abortion for a half century.

“Grey says she felt empowered by her sexual freedom at a young age and was careful about using birth control,” the Times write-up explained. “But even as someone with the access and means to abortion, the choice to end a pregnancy can take its toll: ‘It’s such a grave decision. And it stays with you.’”

This is what you do not typically hear at rallies or even congressional hearings. Abortion is grave. That’s because it involves a mother’s decision to end the life of her baby. That’s a cruel decision to have to make, often with the mother young, as Grey was. She says she had means — presumably to keep the baby too — but young girls and women can feel alone and think that abortion is their only choice.

And there is a deeper cultural malady Grey shines a light on, albeit unintentionally. The headline of the interview emphasized that her abortion “changed her life.” Well of course it did. But the assumption in so many of the post-Roe news stories is that abortions are a better choice in a woman’s life than going ahead with motherhood. I can no longer keep track of how many pieces I’ve read and how much testimony I’ve heard about how a woman wouldn’t have her career without her abortion(s). So it is with Grey: “I wouldn’t have my life. I wouldn’t have had the career I had, I wouldn’t have had anything.” She goes on to say: “And it wasn’t for lack of taking it seriously. I’d always wanted a child. I just didn’t want a child as a teenager. I didn’t want a child where I was [at] in my life.”

At 41, she did give birth to a daughter. But there’s something insidious even about the idea of “planned” in Planned Parenthood. Obviously, make prudent decisions about pregnancy. But college students who want access to abortion are avoiding certain states that have limits on abortion. Are they doing that because they consider abortion part of their birth-control toolkit? As Erika Bachiochi in her magisterial The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision makes clear, when abortion is widely available, people are prone to more reckless casual sex, because they know there is that is an option should a pregnancy occur. More fundamentally, though, a child when one wasn’t planning for one is not the end of the world. A child can change your life and open you to a love you did not know was possible.

We are used to seeing “Love is love,” particularly during the month of June, but love is self-sacrificial. Love is giving when the other can’t say “thank you” or give equally in return. Love is having someone totally dependent on you — and you not being bitter and angry about it. Love is parenthood. A culture that does not value this does not know what love is. Parenthood is heroic. Single mothers are courageous. A dear friend who is a widow testifies with her life how nonnatural it is to raise children without their father. But love makes miracles possible. It’s not easy. It’s not glamorous. But it’s amazing, and we should rally around these remarkable mothers. And the same with fathers who step up to the plate. In this post-Roe America, we should be advocating on behalf of families and doing all we can to prioritize them. Having a child shouldn’t be exorbitantly expensive, for example. That shouldn’t be a partisan cause. Let’s get out of our ideological corners and help families flourish.

Back to Grey, though. What if there wasn’t a Dirty Dancing in her life? Would that have meant the end of the world? She would have had something — a child! And she could have chosen adoption, too. We do teenagers a disservice when we insist that career success is the be-all and end-all. We will not be a healthy culture unless we value family life. Instead, a House committee last week heard from a witness who described her abortion as an act of “self-love.” We’re a culture disguising selfishness as something noble.

Dirty Dancing was set in a posh resort. How wonderfully different the movie would have been if the pregnant dancer could have instead revealed her pregnancy and been supported by her employer or some of the wealthy families vacationing there. How it played out was probably realistic. But that shouldn’t be. Young women should not have to feel that the grave decision to abort is the only or best answer. A mother should never have to choose to end the life of her unborn child. With the end of Roe, life is actually possible in new ways. We must work to make that possible. All of us. Out of our ideological corners, please!

This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.