Drafting Women is Not Only Immoral, It is Disruptive

Written by Daniel Horowitz

The state of the U.S. military readiness has been debated a lot recently while the U.S. Senate considers the law that specifies the budget for the Department of Defense for each fiscal year, also known as the National Defense Authorization Act or NDAA.  We’ve discussed several of those important questions and will follow up in subsequent articles on what is missing from the debate over the military and national defense.  For now I want to focus on the most egregious provision: including women in Selective Service, which can lead to a mandatory draft.

Few senators had the courage to follow U.S. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) and co-sponsor an amendment to the NDAA that would make changes to the military Selective Service Act to ensure that only Congress may decide whether women should be subject to the draft. Any time the nation considers an issue as important as national defense it should be debated in Congress and not decided by bureaucrats.

Whether women should be sent to the front lines, or drafted, or even be in the military are questions that are properly answered by the people’s representatives in Congress.  Barack Obama has spent the past seven years unilaterally placing women in combat, contrary to the recommendations of the Marine commanders, which were born out of a painstaking study they conducted about women in combat.  How can Congress sit idly by when Obama turns our military into a petri dish of social engineering more appropriate for a gender studies department in a liberal university?

Aside from the obvious issues of integrating women in combat, as documented by the Marines, and the moral and cultural problems with a mandatory draft of women, Congress must not forget that there will be secondary and tertiary effects for every decision they make. One effect will be how to handle the inevitability of pregnancies. We say inevitability for two reasons. First, it’s already happening.  Servicewomen are getting pregnant and in many cases those are unexpected pregnancies. Second, whether the Left wants to accept this or not is irrelevant, but the obvious point is that co-ed groups of young-adults will find ways to engage each other. It’s a fantasy to assume otherwise.

It’s no secret that pregnancies occur before and during deployments. According to a presidential commission, “pregnancy was a main reason why the non-deployability rate for female troops was three times higher than for men during the 1990-91 Persian Gulf conflict.” However, hard numbers on the rates of pregnancy are hard to come by.  Either way, the end-goal of co-ed social engineering in the military has wasted so much taxpayer money and has hurt mission readiness.

There is one more point to consider here that no one who supports adding them to the draft wants to address: if women are eligible to be drafted, will they intentionally get pregnant to avoid being forced in the military or a deployment? It’s a good question. Men do it to avoid deployments. Men have tried everything from jumping off a roof to paying a hit man to shoot them in the leg to avoid deployment. So, it’s reasonable to assume that a woman who doesn’t want to be drafted, but still doesn’t want to cut off a finger, will get pregnant to avoid the unknown possibilities of war-fighting.

Earlier this week, U.S. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) criticized U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) for his opposition to the NDAA.  However, McCain fails to understand that destroying the morale and mission readiness of the military through social engineering cannot be ameliorated by a bill authorizing more funding.  Perhaps if McCain’s committee would have utilized the NDAA to push back against Obama’s social engineering instead of exacerbating it, there would be united support behind the defense bill.

What are U.S. Senators McCain, Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Joni Ernst (R-IA), and others telling us about their views on women’s safety, abortion and the pro-life movement, and military readiness if they are willing to push their agenda on an unwilling country?  Forcing women to register for the draft is targeting women and forcing them to make life-altering decisions. The provision to draft women into combat should be removed from the NDAA, or the bill itself should be defeated.

This article was originally posted at ConservativeReview.com