Posted on 07/22/2022 9:12:34 AM PDT by Morgana
Actress Jennifer Grey, known best for her role in the 1987 film Dirty Dancing, recently opened up to the Los Angeles Times about her abortion as a teenager and feeling “emotional” about the end of Roe v. Wade.
Teenage pregnancy and abortion
“When I try to imagine my own daughter at 16, playing house, essentially living with a grown-ass man, doing tons of blow, popping Quaaludes, and going to Studio [54] — not to mention being lied to, cheated on, then gifted with various and sundry STDs and unwanted pregnancies, it makes me feel physically ill,” she said. “No teenager should be swimming in waters that dark … .” Yet, these were Grey’s teen years. Despite this, as traumatic as it sounds, Grey claims to have felt empowered by her sexual freedom at that age and told the Times that she used birth control carefully.
But drugs, living with an adult male, and dealing with STDs and unwanted pregnancies are likely not what our nation’s first feminists imagined when they fought for women’s rights (which did not include abortion). It’s hard to conflate that dangerous and reckless lifestyle with empowerment. She admits she wouldn’t have wanted her own daughter, now age 20, to have lived her teenage years like that.
It was during those years, prior to her role in Dirty Dancing, that Grey had an abortion and she implied that it actually had a negative impact on her. “It’s such a grave decision,” she said. “And it stays with you.” Yet, she attempts to justify it.
“I wouldn’t have my life. I wouldn’t have had the career I had, I wouldn’t have had anything [if not for the abortion],” she said. “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.”
Mothers and career success
The truth is that Grey doesn’t know what her life would have been like if she had welcomed her child. She assumes she wouldn’t have had her career or “anything” at all. But her life could have been made better by her child, something most mothers say about their own lives after having a baby.
Grey’s implication with this statement is that mothers are incapable of career success. Other women in the industry have proven this misogynistic theory wrong. Director and actress Emerald Fennell was seven months pregnant when she directed “The Crown,” and said being pregnant during that time “really helped” and “gave me this weird power for myself.”
Monica Potter, Shirley Temple, Naomi Judd, Solange Knowles, Niki Taylor, Maya Angelou, Aretha Franklin, and Loretta Lynn were all teenage mothers who became successful in their careers. Women have even won Olympic medals while pregnant. Countless women attribute their success to their children, who inspired them to work harder.
The idea of “unwanted” people
Even more troubling is that Grey was clear she had the abortion because she didn’t “want” a child and therefore, destroyed that child’s life. It is eugenic to label a human being as “unwanted” for the purpose of robbing them of their humanity, value, dignity, and very life in order to live the life you please.
The idea of “unwanted” people isn’t new — it’s been used to justify genocide for centuries. People have been dehumanized and called unfit and undesirable throughout history and those labels have allowed horrors to occur: the Holocaust and slavery, for instance. No human being deserves that treatment.
Abortion is still dangerous
The most controversial part of Dirty Dancing is arguably the illegal abortion obtained by the character Penny. Grey’s character, ironically named Baby, takes money from her father to help procure the abortion for Penny, but the procedure is botched.
“We saw someone who was hemorrhaging,” Grey said about the scene. “We saw what happens to people without means — the haves and the have nots. I love that part of the storyline because it was really a feminist movie in a rom-com. It was a perfect use of history.”
But forcing legalized abortion on every state in the January 1973 Supreme Court decision of Roe v. Wade didn’t end botched abortions. In fact, in 1972 (the year before Roe), the CDC recorded 39 deaths from illegal abortion and 24 deaths from legal abortion. By 1973, the first year abortion was legal throughout the nation, the CDC reported that more women actually died from legal abortion than from illegal abortion (25 v. 19).
While it is unknown how many women are injured by legal abortion each year in the United States (only half of all states are required to report abortion complications), there are countless 911 calls from abortion facilities that detail the horrors of legalized abortion. And it is still underprivileged women who are being targeted for these so-called “safe” abortions.
The end of Roe
Grey called the June 24, 2022, Supreme Court decision of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturning Roe “so fundamentally wrong.” She said about the decision, “I feel so emotional. Even though I’ve seen it coming, even though we’ve been hearing what’s coming, it does’t feel real.”
Over nearly 50 years, 63 million human beings have been violently killed by abortion and disposed of as medical waste. For five decades, women have been pressured and coerced into abortions and told that abortion was their only choice. Roe v. Wade may be history, but the mass genocide of innocent human beings is still raging on in America. And that is what is fundamentally wrong.
“I wouldn’t have my life.”
what about the lives of the mother and daughter killed by the car you were riding in and doing God knows what in .... why was Broderick driving so recklessly?
She ruined her career when she got rid of her nose by making it look “normal.” Her big nose was part of her cuteness.
“Seek ye first the kingdom of God”, practice makes perfect.
If that's the sort of daughter you imagine having, then you shouldn't become a parent in the first place.
AMEN!! The discussion of after seems to be ignored. I bet she has helped many in making the right and moral decision.
Except now they film themselves having anal sex with African American men and post it on the internet.
All of these videos then get consolidated on websites like Celebrity Jihad.
That nose job made her look good. Before that, not so much.
I am sorry for your apparent lack of hope and faith. Before marriage to a good man and becoming a mother, I did not have as much trust either. Learning that my husband and my children really are loyal and trustworthy has been a beautiful life lesson. And so many things I do and have are because of this life purpose that is bigger than myself. Not saying you were called to parenthood, but aversion to it out of fear seems wrong, as opposed to being called to childlessness as part of a bigger, happier journey of life.
I liked her in “Red Dawn.”
Wolverines!
She married and later on had a daughter that got pregnant in high school despite the talk about sex and the daughter had the baby. The lady worked three jobs along with her husband to help her daughter and grand child and the daughter worked as well and went to college she graduated, has a career and husband now.
Girl with a big nose gets rich and famous, gets a nose job, now nobody recognizes her. Hah!
Maybe of Jennifer’s parents raised her right... none of that likely would have happened to her in the first place.
Just saying.
What a sad story. That’s the part the “pro-choice” crowd always leaves out: sometimes it’s not the woman’s choice but the man’s to abort the child. He forced her to abort, but she’s the one who will live with the guilt.
“No teenager should be swimming in waters that dark “
Sounds like she is a great parent.
“I wouldn’t have my life. I wouldn’t have had the career I had, I wouldn’t have had anything [if not for the abortion],” she said.
And she KNOWS this.. - HOW?
How is it that these baby killers seem to know their futures on both sides of a decision??
Do they have super-powers?
Her father Joel Grey was married to her mother when she was conceived, but he is a gay man and was on the downlow for those years. Who only knows what kind of childhood she had.
She says she wouldn't have had the kind of career she has had without the abortion, and that is a sad statement, given her small C- and D-list output. Had she been happy and fulfilled, she may have done much more.
Single is simple. Single is predictable. Single is sane. Single is lonely. The first three win out and I’m fine with it. But....you are right. Aversion to fatherhood is wrong, as in not natural. Its an abnormal reaction to an abnormal condition...which is normal as far as im concerned. I wish I didnt feel the way I do. It is what it is.
I wish you peace.
Not true; she was born in 1960; same year The Pill was first introduced. There was great resistance in society to oral contraception not only because it was a systemic hormone with unknown effects on the general market; but also because many doctors and commentators responded to it the way many have responded to abortion: that it would contribute to immorality and endanger the institution of marriage. And it did.
Widespread Pill usage didn't start hitting the mainstream until the mid- to late 60s, when the first group of Baby Boomer women were graduating from college and Second Wave feminism and "Women's Lib" had started up.
It's marginally possible she might have obtained a prescription for The Pill then; but doctors still were hesitating to prescribe it for minor teenager girls, which she was when she got pregnant.
And The Pill wasn't without complications. The formula was adjusted continually after it hit the market because users were having glaucoma and other serious side effects.
The movie she was in with Patrick Swayze was in the mid 80s
By then most women I knew were taking some form of it
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