Anti-abortion forces are strong in the military

It’s not only in the civilian sector that the battle for abortion rights and respect for women’s basic reproductive health rages on. While such milestones as the Roe v. Wade case have made it clear that any woman has the right to terminate their pregnancy for any reason until the point where the fetus becomes viable (ie. when it can survive outside the womb), such rights have only been secured for the general public. It is a far different matter in the military, where servicewomen who live, fight, bleed and die for their country are forced to deal with the harsh and completely unconstitutional ban on abortion present throughout the American armed forces. The difficulties and challenges they face, from lack of support and care to the shaming and ostracism they receive when their condition becomes known, are monumental, and some cases are so extreme that some women are even forced to carry out their own abortions, despite the incredible risks.

Kathryn Joice, the author of Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement which explores the eponymous hideous Christian baby-making program, writes at ReligionDispatches about such a case. It’s a sickening story, but one everyone should take the time to read as it brings out the true horrors faced by brave women serving in the U.S. Military. The whole thing is quite lengthy, so I’ve included some key excerpts from the start of the article, below.

“You hear these legends of coat-hanger abortions,” a 26-year-old former Marine sergeant told me recently, “but there are no coat hangers in Iraq. I looked.” Amy (who prefers not to use her real name) was stationed in Fallujah as a military journalist two years ago when she discovered she was pregnant. As a female Marine, a distinct minority in the branch, Amy was fearful of going to her chain of command to explain her situation.

For military women, who lack all rights to medical privacy, facing an unplanned pregnancy is a daunting obstacle. Thanks to anti-abortion forces in Congress, military hospitals are banned from providing abortion services, except in cases of life endangerment, rape, or incest (and for the latter two, only if the patient pays for the service herself). Amy says her options were “like being given a choice between swimming in a pond full of crocodiles or piranhas.”

“I have long been aware of the stigma surrounding this circumstance and knew my career would likely be over, though I have received exceptional performance reviews in the past,” Amy explains. Although Fallujah has a surgical unit, and abortion is one of the most common surgical procedures, Amy knew that if her pregnancy were discovered, she would be sent back to her home base at North Carolina’s Camp Lejeune, where she would then have to seek a private abortion off-base, or she could request leave in Iraq and try her luck at a local hospital. She also knew she could face reprimands from her commanding officers for having had sex in Iraq (part of a broader prohibition on sex in war zones), and that she might not be promoted as a result: a potentially career-ending situation in the Marines, where failure to obtain regular promotions results in being discharged. Moreover, as a woman in the military, accustomed to proving herself to her male peers over her six-year career, Amy was wary of appearing a “weak female.”

“If you get sent home for something like that, everyone will know about it,” says Amy. “That’s a really bad stigma in the military. I thought, that’s not me, I’ve worked harder and I could outrun all the guys. So I chose to stay, and that was just as bad.”

From a remove of two years, Amy now sees the sex that resulted in her pregnancy as rape: something that may have qualified her for an on-base (though self-funded) abortion. However, at the time, because the rape wasn’t brutally violent, and because she had seen fellow servicewomen be ostracized for “crying rape” in the past, she imagined nothing but trouble would come of making a complaint.

Instead, using herbal abortifacient supplements ordered online, Amy self-aborted. Unable to find a coat hanger she used her sanitized rifle cleaning rod and a laundry pin to manually dislodge the fetus while lying on a towel on the bathroom floor. It was a procedure she attempted twice, each time hemorrhaging profusely. Amy lost so much blood on the first attempt that her skin blanched and her ears rang. She continued working for five weeks, despite increasing sickness, until she realized she was still pregnant.

The morning after her second attempt, she awoke in great pain, and finally told a female supervisor, who told Amy to take an emergency leave to fly back to the United States where a private abortion clinic could finish the procedure. However, Amy was afraid that she would miscarry on the 15-hour plane ride and have no medical escort to help her. She went to the military hospital instead and told the doctor everything. Shortly thereafter, her company first sergeant and other officers were notified of Amy’s condition. The first sergeant came to her hospital room to announce that Amy would be punished under Article 92 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which addresses violations of general regulations, for having had sex in a war zone.

That night, Amy miscarried alone in her shower. Fearful of the advice of a sympathetic female officer who suggested that Amy might be charged for the abortion as well (she wasn’t), she flushed the fetus down the toilet. “I don’t believe there was ever a life or a soul there,” Amy says, “but I feel undignified for doing that.” When her nonjudicial punishment (a plea sentence for a misdemeanor-like offense) went through, Amy was fined $500 and given a suspended rank reduction.

[…]

At Amy’s request, she was sent home from Iraq, after a military psychiatrist determined that she was “too psychologically unstable” to remain, and diagnosed her with acute anxiety, PTSD, and depression. “They convinced themselves that anyone who would do a self-abortion is crazy,” Amy says. “It’s not a crazy thing. It’s something that rational, thinking women do when they have no options.”

Alexa Kolbi-Molinas, staff attorney for the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project, says Amy’s horrifying story is the logical outcome of the longstanding military ban on abortion that affects 200,000 female service members as well as female military spouses and dependents living on military bases covered by the armed forces’ Tricare health coverage. Shocking as the story may be, Kolbi-Molinas says, “If you restrict women to unsafe abortions, this is what will happen.”

The rest of the article goes on at length about the details behind behind the abortion rights opposition in the military and the risks, both in health and to their careers, that innocent women face when they fall pregnant in the armed forces. These women are heroes, going abroad to save lives and protect their people’s freedoms (however much I may think the wars currently being fought are the results of lies and misplaced priorities, to put it mildly), and yet they’re continually shamed and suppressed in the male-dominated, conservative military forces. If there’s one thing that’s clear above all others, it’s that these sorts of humane rights and freedoms abuses are the reason why the pro-choice “side” is the only rational, sane and humane way to view abortion rights.

(via Blag Hag)

Technorati tags: abortion · military · humane rights · military women