June 10, 2010
The fight to allow gay and bisexual people to serve openly in the military is already drawing political blood in Washington, but tucked into the same 852-page Pentagon policy bill as the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” is a little-noticed amendment that takes on another emotionally charged issue: making abortion easier for military women in war zones.
In a vote that advocates of abortion rights sought beforehand to keep quiet, the Senate Armed Services Committee passed a provision on May 27 to allow privately financed abortions at military hospitals and bases. Current law bans abortions in most cases at military facilities, even if women pay themselves, meaning they must go outside to private hospitals and clinics — an impossibility for many of the estimated 100,000 American servicewomen in foreign countries, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The result, the advocates say, is that military women serving overseas do not have the same access to basic health care that other American women do, or that is ensured by the laws of the country they are fighting to protect. “It’s an issue of basic fairness,” said Cecile Richards, the president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, one of eight women’s advocacy groups that lobbied heavily last month for the amendment’s passage.
Opponents say that because the abortions would be performed in government facilities, taxpayer money would still help subsidize the underlying costs — the reason that Senator Ben Nelson, a Nebraska Democrat who is opposed to abortion, voted against the amendment. “He opposes government-provided or funded abortion,” said Jake Thompson, a spokesman.
The amendment, sponsored by Senator Roland W. Burris, Democrat of Illinois, passed 15 to 12, and advocates say they are cautiously optimistic about its chances in the full Senate this summer and even in negotiations with the House, where Representative Ike Skelton, the Missouri Democrat who leads the Armed Services Committee, remains opposed.
Similar amendments have failed numerous times since a ban was put in place by Congressional Republicans in the 1990s, but this is the first such vote in the Obama administration, when Democrats are in control and women have been at war in Iraq and Afghanistan for nearly a decade. The Pentagon declined to comment on the proposed legislation.
The Army and the Marine Corps do not make public how many servicewomen become pregnant each year in Iraq and Afghanistan, but whatever the number, thought to be relatively small, an unwanted pregnancy in a war zone is a professional as well as a personal crisis for a woman. With no access to safe abortions outside the base, regulations require that a woman be flown home within two weeks of the time she finds out she’s pregnant, a particular stigma for unmarried women that ends any future career advancement.
“The military doesn’t forgive you,” said one unmarried former Marine who tried to self-abort when she got pregnant in Iraq in 2006. “You’re never going to get promoted again.” The Marine, who asked that her name not be used, said she ended up in a military hospital in Iraq with severe bleeding and was eventually honorably discharged.
Despite the current ban, abortion has been available through shifting regulations in the United States military in the past. In 1970, three years before Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal, the Department of Defense quietly adopted a policy permitting military hospitals to provide “therapeutic” abortions, regardless of the laws of the states they were in. President Richard M. Nixon revoked the policy less than a year later, saying that abortion was “an unacceptable form of population control.” But there was still an Air Force regulation on the books that required even married female officers who became pregnant to be discharged unless they terminated the pregnancy, although they could not do so in military hospital.
As recounted in a new book by Linda Greenhouse and Reva B. Siegel, “Before Roe v. Wade: Voices that Shaped the Abortion Debate Before the Supreme Court Ruling,” in 1972 a career Air Force officer and a Roman Catholic, Capt. Susan R. Struck, challenged the regulation in a lawsuit that reached the Supreme Court. But before the case could be argued by Captain Struck’s lawyer, the future Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Air Force waived the policy.
Taxpayer-financed abortions were common in American military hospitals in the first years after Roe v. Wade — there were 26,000 abortions performed between August 1976 and August 1977, according to a 2002 Congressional Research Service report — but Congressional Republicans began restricting access to them in the late 1970s.
Shortly after President Bill Clinton took office in 1993, he signed a memorandum allowing abortions at military facilities if they were paid for with private money. But by 1996 the Republican-controlled Congress had instituted the current blanket ban on abortions at military facilities, allowing them only in cases of rape or incest, or to save the life of the mother.
Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, was among those to vote last month against the most recent amendment, arguing that it would be impossible to ensure that no federal money would be used even in privately financed abortions.
“The effect of the Burris amendment would be to open the door for President Obama to reinstate a Clinton-era policy that allows abortions to be performed in overseas facilities on a pre-paid basis,” said Kevin Bishop, a spokesman for Mr. Graham.
Senator Scott Brown, Republican of Massachusetts, who has been a supporter of abortion rights, also voted against the amendment. His office declined to comment on his reasons.
Gays and The Military: A Bad Fit
Reply With Quote
177
Bookmarks