Army pregnancy ban

MAJ GEN Cucolo is under fire for his ban on pregnancy by female soldiers getting ready to deploy or currently in the battlefield. Female soldiers failing to adhere, as well as the father of the children, could face court martial and jail time.

In all of the discussion about women being allowed the same rights as males, the one thing that doesn't get discussed is pregnancy. Men don't get pregnant necessitating a leave of absence. The issue of pregnant military women and the impact to mission readiness first occurred during Desert Storm. Women who were pregnant or that subsequently became pregnant were not allowed to deploy. These women held key positions in their respective units requiring a backfill from another unit. This created a cascading effect on mission readiness in other units. Ten tears after Desert Storm, the US military goes to war again without addressing the implications of pregnant military women.

Young women in the military are no different than their civilian counterparts. They may choose to have a child as a single parent. As long as they are in the United States, this doesn't present a problem. However, single mothers giving birth in the Middle East face local laws that may not recognized their mother's right to their child. This happened to a female sailor while I was in the Middle East. She was going to give birth in Bahrain and under their laws, an unmarried woman forfeits her child to the government for adoption. The young sailor had to be evacuated out of the theater to prevent her child from being seized by the Bahrain government.

Women and men are different and too often the federal government pretends laws can overcome physiology. Or physics. For example, a 5'5" woman weighing 120-140lbs does not have the same mass as a man at 5'10" and weighing 190lbs. Those additional 50;70lbs consists of denser muscles and thicker bones. A bomb blast will cause more severe injuries to a female versus male (assuming the same distance from the blast and wearing similar protective gear). The female will have less body mass to absorb the trauma. The physics doesn't care about regulations or policies that say men and women are to be treated the same.

The next problem is society still places high value on a woman's appearance. Women vets for the first time in history are walking around with missing body parts or disfigurements. No one knows how these disfigurements will effect the female veteran.

I've wondered about how training woman to become killers will affect these veterans once they get out. We've studied for years the effect of battle on male soldiers and watched as the mental health community has gone from first shell shock, to battle fatigue to finally post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to describe the effects of war AFTER the warrior is now longer in the service. Military personnel are being diagnosed with PTSD earlier but the truth is the worst symptoms won't show until much later in their lives.

Imagine your daughter or younger sister being in combat. She may be the only female in the unit and the unit engages in regular firefights or the constant threat of roadside bombs. The same young woman has to over come all of her feminine tendencies to nurture and resort to shooting enemies before they can shoot and kill her or her fellow soldiers. The young woman does this for 3 or 4 tours, each lasting a year. She then leaves the military and goes back to her family or tries to start one. Conflict most certainly will arise in her psyche as she tries to justify how a cold blooded killer can be deserving of her children's love. She will most certainly be conflicted about her children following in her footsteps to become a soldier who may be forced to go into combat one day. These conflicts could manifest in ways that we can't begin to imagine.