Unsurprisingly, our old friend “The Thinking Housewife” is aghast at the notion of women serving in combat. What is a little surprising is why. In one of her many recent posts on the subject she offers this unique take on the subject:
There are so many unexamined consequences of the full integration of women into the military that one barely knows where to start, but one of the obvious places is with the fact that the Armed Forces will be increasingly in the business of population control.
Yes, that’s right: women in combat means women using birth control. The horror!
You see, women who are nine momths pregnant can’t exactly serve on the front lines. So that means the military is going to have to get in the business of helping its women soldiers avoid becoming pregnant.
In addition to providing rations and equipment, troops in combat will need ample supplies of contraceptives — and under this mentality, it will be the military’s responsibility to prevent pregnancy. Given that pregnancies can be, even in the best of circumstances, “unintended,” a woman who becomes pregnant on tour after her unit runs out of birth control pills or condoms will now have cause to blame the military for her offspring’s existence. We will almost certainly see women suing the Army for damages after “unintended” pregnancy. And as a consequence, the military will need to become more and more involved in the effective sterilization of their female troops.
Um, what? Sterilization? When women stop using birth control, they can become pregnant. Heck, they can become pregnant while still using birth control. Calling female birth control “sterilization” is a bit like calling a condom a vasectomy.
She ends her piece with this doozy:
As I said before, women don’t join the military as equals of men in order to defend their country. They join it to destroy their country. An egalitarian military must embrace socially destructive ideals. What can be more emblematic of our times than a military unit equipped with guns to destroy the enemy and contraceptives to destroy future soldiers? We have lost both the will to fight and the will to live.
Time to pull out the Don Draper “what?” gif again.
Actually, I don’t think that will be adequate to convey the sheer WTFery of that conclusion. I’m pulling out the big guns this time.
So…military women using birth control is destroying the country….? How does that even work?
The thinking housewife proves once again, that her name is ironic. She doesn’t have two brain cells to rub together in order to think. I’m pretty sure my six year old has a better handle on reality.
LOL this reminds me of a conversation I had with a person who had put their hand up for deployment in Afghanistan (they’re not in a branch/service normally associated with land-based deployments). Anyhoo, they got their deployment kit home, opened it on the bed, and out fell something like 70 condoms – among other items. Their comment to me was “I was so pleased my wife wasn’t there” – not because the person would cheat, but because I don’t think he was expecting either condoms or that number of condoms.
So yeah, when females don’t serve, there’s no birth/STI control provided. /rolls eyes
So, Unthinking Mousewife is under the impression that birth control causes sterilisation even though it can fail … and there are so many women in the army that the US’s population is somehow threatened by their non-breeding numbers … and that egalitarianism in the military means embracing socially destructive ideals (which probably boils down to “equality is evil in her alleged mind) … there’s too much stupid to parse here.
I wonder how she thinks women soldiers in other armies manage? Or is it just the US army that’s meant to be such fragile flowers that providing birth control is going to send them into a pearl-clutching tizz?
The Non Thinking Housewife is second only to MarkyMark for sheer WTFuckery.
Obviously she never thought that the military ALREADY provides/gives access to BC for female troops. What a maroon.
I want to shut this ninny into a room with Tammy Duckworth and require her to repeat this garbage to the Congresswoman’s face. And record it and slap the video up on YouTube for all eternity.
OH FOR FUCK’S SAKE CONTRACEPTIVES ARE NOT ABORTIFACENTS THEY DO NOT DESTROY ANYTHING THEY PREVENT CONCEPTION THAT’S THE ENTIRE FUCKING POINT OF USING THEM.
Ahem. Sorry. Big pet peeve of mine. The forced birthers are very eager to spread this bullshit that birth control pills cause abortions. It’s part of their phoney “religious freedom” crap about the contraception mandate too.
Notice that male soldiers have been issued condoms since at least WWII (?) and that hasn’t bothered this nitwit, all the “destruction of future soldiers” caused by equipping military personnel with condoms to try and prevent them from catching diseases that will sideline them. Ugh.
On a side note, this “come to an extreme wacky conclusion” about something seems to be an American thing lately. It’s like we feel driven more and more to assert our Precious! Individual! Personalities! that we just keep bypassing the obvious objections to something and just coming up with the nuttiest shit we can think of. No wonder the rest of the world thinks we’re all insane. I mean, why couldn’t she just say what all the other conservatives say, that women shouldn’t be in combat because women are supposed to be the nurturing peacemaker healer mommy types and also we’re too delicate and fragile and so on? Possibly it’s because deep down she knows that’s nonsense, but she had to say something, and also prove it to herself, so out came the weirdo justifications.
I guarantee you, in ten more years time How To Wear An Apocalyptic Sandwich Board 101 will be taught in every US public school.
Kitteh’s: I’m sure to T(N)THW, there’s just the US, and scary brown people we have to fight. Other armies? Haha.
I hope she has her fainting couch and smelling salts handy. Good grief
Good point, hellkell!
OT I squeeed over Biscuit and the Ipad. 🙂
Is she okay with the male soldiers spilling their seed? Because we females still can’t do parthenogenesis (thanks to Shriekback for teaching me that word!)
It’s not even like birth control is limited to condoms or the pill, neither of which is an abortifacient, as has already been pointed out. There’s the depoprovira jag, which lasts three months and the implant, the name of which I can’t remember, despite having one, which lasts three years. I have been told by many healthcare providers that both have a very small fail rate, and both often prevent menstruation. I don’t think it would cost so much to provide them any women in the armed forces who felt they needed/wanted them.
Also, my mum joined the RAF during the cold war in order to help protect her country, and it was where she met my dad, so a big expletive deleted to both the thinking housewife, and her horse.
(Apologies for any unneeded expletives or spelling mistakes, have been trying to persuade my friends that the local wrestling circuit is a great night out. Success; limited, booze, not so much.)
…buh?
Honestly, were I in such a position, I’d be glad for birth control just to keep things more manageable. I never thought people would get UPSET over it; rape in the military seems to be pretty staggering, from what I understand, and abortions not easily available. Wouldn’t BC be an obvious thing?
@LBT: Birth control is for sluts you see. Can’t have them in the military, no sir.
OMG, someone made almost this exact same argument to me on the NaNoWriMo fora: “Your fictional world can’t have a caste of warriors of both genders because how will they make enough babies!”
This argument is so stupid. I’ve had one kid by choice. I had an easy pregnancy, breastfeeding was a walk in the park, and I’m sure I could have kept on having babies. However, I didn’t want any more (I had a living to earn for one thing) and society doesn’t need more babies either.There are plenty of other women like me, with one or two kids. If we had some weird situation in which we didn’t have enough women able to give birth to keep up the population, I’m sure some of us would step up. Women in the military on birth control is not a problem and will not be a problem anytime in he future.
Why are these croutons assuming that all the breeding done by soldiers is with other soldiers? I mean, haven’t they even looked at all the news clips of troops coming home and being greeted by tearful spouses and children?
Did you think of decreasing the DNA/RNA mutation in vivo mutation rate, adjusting pregnancy duration or number of fetuses per pregnancy, hermaphroditism, and/or having longer female fertility duration? Assuming you want something similar to current human pregnancy biology.
Of course not! D’uh. 🙂
Yeah with all 7 billion of us I think the human reproduction can take a breather for a few decades.
clairedammit – what’s the bet (this goes back to hellkell’s comment) that the Mindless Mousewife thinks all noble USian soldiers are white, and all the naughty women trying to get into the army are white, and they are NEEDED to outbreed all those brown people!
(Because of course too many humans is not a notion this lot could think of; only too many of the wrong sort of humans.)
Yeah, I’m a little bemused by this huge fear that humans will go extinct if we aren’t constantly keeping an eye on it.
Guys. GUYS. Seven BILLION of us. Not gonna die out. It’s okay. We can relax about it.
When god said “go forth and multiply” what he meant was “math is important”.
Iz real.
How can you fulfill your purpose for living by producing human resources for the military to consume if you are in the military dispatching enemy soldiers? Srsly? That’s the problem?
I read this and I think my head may have exploded. That, or my IQ just dropped 80 points, one or the other.
Now, I’m certainly not an expert on ladyparts and how they operate, but in the previous thread I picked up that Teh Pill will prevent the lady soldieresses from menstruating, right? So, isn’t this a win-win all around?
Hard to say, since I think my head actually did explode trying to make sense of TH’s, uh, argument.
Where do they come up with this shit?
Oh, I just answered myself. Never mind.
Why is she upset about this now??? Birth control is certainly nothing new, women in combat is nothing new, and women in combat taking birth control is nothing new. We know very well what the outcome of all of this WILL be, because this stuff was already debated decades ago and now the results have been in for quite some time. The Tricare and VA system cover birth control for both active duty women and military wives (and husbands) and has for a very long time. And yet somehow the world is still turning and society is still functioning.
I wish these dominionist idiots would just evolve and get it over with already instead of having to be dragged kicking and screaming not just into the future, but into the present.