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Oh, yeah, and speak for yourself. You’re sure not speaking for Army female MPs, for me, or those female Marines who were killed in Fallujah.

Time off?? I can’t speak for the Army, but if you’re a Marine and you’re injured or pregnant, you don’t get “time off”. They will find SOMETHING for you to do, unless you are near death or bedridden.

The problem is that it’s a lot harder to prove a woman intentionally got pregnant to avoid deployment (not necessarily combat mind you) than to prove a man intentionally injured himself. So there’s always that little bugger in the back of their heads saying “Nah, she just did it on purpose!” Goes back to that whole thing about unmarried women who get pregnant are whores…and how they apparently think only stupid women have babies.

And as far as women being in actual combat, it is and isn’t true. There’s two different “types” of combat here and people keep talking about them as if they are the same. One is that there is no front line to “keep the women away from” so jobs like military police and truck driver are suddenly fair game and sometimes run into firefights in this war. Is that combat? Sure. Most women are in these sorts of positions and not part of an actual combat/grunt unit. But female Marines are not assigned to grunt units. They aren’t patrolling in AAVs and LAVs or functioning as a normal part of a unit doing patrols and fighting through towns. In fact, I’ve never met a grunt who worked with women in his unit. I’ve never heard of a female Marine being assigned to a ground level grunt unit either and believe me, if it happens, we’d hear. Grunts would be blowing gaskets left and right.

The lazy lying pregnant woman is the stereotype that certain sexist conservative guys like to talk about. If one guy talks about her to another guy, then she becomes two women. If the story passes to a third, a third woman springs into slutty existance. Strangely enough, the men who pass around horror stories about their shitty female coworkers are uttelry unaware and uninterested in the heroics of female soldiers—or they flatly believe it’s a ‘social experiment’—a la Rush Limbaugh.

It’s a great canary in the coal mine, though. It really reveals a mindset.

Look, people of both sexes have medical issues that excuse them from combat. If a woman has an unplanned pregnancy — just as if a man has an unplanned injury — she needs to deal with that. Taking time off isn’t ridiculous.

And honestly, I’d take the Army’s position on pregnancy a little more seriously if their healthcare policies covered birth control (including emergency contraception) and abortion. As it stands, abortion definitely isn’t covered, and EC isn’t available at Army hospitals. Just something else to think about.

Women aren’t discharged when they get pregnant anymore. Nor are men discharged when they break their legs playing football. Each is reassigned to some other duty during the duration of their disability, and put back on regular duty when it ends.

Question: If men in the army are injured in a non-combat situation and can’t perform his duties — like, let’s say someone breaks his leg while playing football with his friends off-base — is he punished?

No.

Question: If men in the army are injured in a non-combat situation and can’t perform his duties — like, let’s say someone suffers a self-inflicted injury by shooting themselves in the foot— is he punished?

Yes. The same would go for lots of other activities too.

The army’s structured around coercing people to fight who don’t want to. So they have rules to make it difficult to get out of fighting. I support allowing women in combat, but I genuinely think fitting pregnancy into these rules is difficult.

Wouldn’t it piss you off no end if you had to risk your life in combat, but someone else got a ticket home because her desire to have children was regarded as more pressing than the job she signed up for?