General Continues to Defend Military Ban on Pregnancy
U.S. Forces Iraq Division North Commander Gen. Anthony Cucolo is still yammering on about his ban on pregnancy that was overturned by his higher ups late last year. His complaint: those around him knew what he meant, he never intended to actually jail anyone for becoming pregnant. As I said when I wrote about the bad implementation of this policy before, if he didn't intend to jail anyone, that is the policy he should have written. After all, the military is a very literal place.
Despite General Cucolo's claims that he really just wants to keep his team together in the face of this war, that runs into a little trouble with the facts of the situation. The women who became pregnant were still sent home, the men were not, so his punishment was not evenly distributed as he intended.
At the end of the day, the women punished under this policy were not given any choices. Their lives were dictated either by a broken condom or because they happened to work for a man who doesn't know the difference between emergency contraception and abortion. Their boss would rather punish a woman for being slutty than waste time finding a way to give her a choice to continue her career and not bother him while he plays Master of the Universe in Northern Iraq.
Access to emergency contraceptive and TRICARE funded abortion could have made an unplanned pregnancy a private matter between a woman and a medic instead of a public spectacle for an entire Command. For these reasons, I am more inclined to believe this is about control; because, you see, the military is all about how much of your life it can control. A public flogging makes for a much better statement than a private medical matter.
Even on the American Women Veteran's Facebook page, the argument seems to be all about how horrid these slutty women are for making all the other good and virtuous women look bad.
Unplanned pregnancies are upsetting unit cohesion because we are letting them.
Where is the fight for TRICARE funded abortions and Plan B in the formulary? Where is the public outcry to give women options? Why are we assuming that these women want to be sent home to become mothers when we have seen that some of them are desperate not to. And let's not forget the high rates of rape in the military.
How many of them actually do continue with this career-altering pregnancy after we can no longer see them?
We need to stop assuming that the only thing going on here is women getting pregnant to get out of duty or to satisfy some biological urge, and pretending that an unplanned pregnancy is the end of the world for the war effort. Instead, how about we demand that Congress support putting Plan B in the TRICARE formulary, or how about we demand that the Hyde Amendment be repealed so that TRICARE can fund abortions?
Instead of punishing, let's give some solutions.
That is the opportunity we are missing, and the point that the General has missed.
Brandann Hill-Mann
is a proggy-liberal, Native American, feminist, invisibly disabled, U.S. Navy Veteran currently living in South Korea on Uncle Sam's dime. She blogs at random babble... and FWD/Forward.
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