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On Thursday, the Senate Armed Services Committee voted to repeal a law banning military hospitals from providing abortion care. Current law prohibits military hospitals from providing abortion care except in cases of rape, incest or threat to a woman’s life.
A woman serving abroad who becomes pregnant has few options. A pregnant woman serving abroad must interrupt her deployment and return home, whether or not she chooses to keep the pregnancy. If she decides that she would like to terminate the pregnancy, she is barred from doing so unless the pregnancy threatens her life, or is the result of rape or incest. Without full access to reproductive health services including abortion, the government effectively discriminates against women who choose to serve in the military.
In her short documentary The Coat Hanger Project, Angie Young interviews a young sergeant who served in Iraq and nearly died from a self-induced unsafe abortion:
“I became pregnant while I was in Iraq and I knew there was already this huge stigma against women in the military…and it’s actually one of their main arguments about why women shouldn’t be allowed to go to combat is because well, they’ll all get pregnant, and so I was pretty much on my own at this point…So one night…I used, I think it was like a laundry pin…I got it through my cervix, like I had a hard time dilating my cervix…I had an episode of bleeding where I thought I had miscarried or aborted so at one point I was sitting over the toilet and my hands…you know my head was in my hands and I remember I looked down at my hands and they were just white and I was shaking and my ears were ringing and I thought ‘Oh my god, you know, I’m gonna die….”
Portions of this article are excerpted from the Summer 2009 issue of Because magazine.
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