The cruel twist hurts women in the military

The Pentagon’s Plan for Prohibiting Prostitution in the First Two Years: State of the Art and Recent Senate Budget Measures on Reproductive Health Care

To help address these challenges, the Pentagon recently announced three policies. The first two authorize travel allowances and absences without leave for service women to access reproductive care if it’s unavailable in their duty station. Service members may not be able to afford travel and so the Pentagon provides it for other procedures that aren’t available in their area.

One of the greatest civil rights struggles of our time is secure access to reproductive care, and as long as former President Harry Truman was in office, President Joe Biden has an opportunity to lead. Today, at a minimum, that means creating a policy to account for access to reproductive care in the Pentagon’s basing and personnel decisions.

The recent changes may make service members travel farther, need to take more time off, and pay more out-of-pocket expenses for reproductive health care, all of which could have a negative impact on America’s armed forces. A Pentagon spokesman speaking to reporters Thursday.

The Hyde Amendment prohibits federal funds from being used for abortions only in cases of rape, incest or when the mother’s life is at risk. According to the report to congress, 91 abortions were done at U.S military hospitals in the last two years.

Fort Hood, which is located in Texas, and Fort Campbell, which is located in Kentucky, are both in states where abortion is not allowed.

The Pentagon is a decision-making body: How to protect women’s access to reproductive healthcare in the U.S. Department of Defense

The memo also takes steps on behalf of health care providers who work for the Department of Defense. The Pentagon will pay the costs of providers who want to be licensed in other states in order to perform official duties, along with providing legal and other assistance for providers who face civil or criminal penalties for doing so.

Editor’s Note: Michael Bennet, a Democrat, is the senior US senator from Colorado. The opinions expressed in this commentary are of his own. View more opinion on CNN.

I support the Biden administration in protecting access to care for the service women who protect us, but the administration should go further. The Pentagon did not have any policy to account for the harm that moving a base would do to reproductive health care in the state it was relocated to.

Over the past decade, the number of women in the military has increased. They now represent roughly a fifth of the total force and over a third of our civilian workforce. Like any service member, women don’t decide where they serve when they volunteer. The Pentagon has a decision to make.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/28/opinions/military-service-women-abortion-access-bennet/index.html

Preferential Treatment for Women: Restoring the Right to Choose in Military Reparation Laws, Protecting Abortion and Ending Pregnancies

Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, 18 states have rushed to ban or limit abortion access. Ten have no exceptions, even for rape or incest. Meanwhile, radical state legislators have introduced bills restricting the freedom of women to travel from one state to another for reproductive care. And several states – from Iowa to Nebraska – have only begun to chip away at a woman’s right to choose.

Doctors and nurses have been threatened with 99 years in jail if they perform an abortion in Alabama. The state’s attorney general even suggested using a chemical endangerment law – which is designed to protect kids from meth – to prosecute women for ending their pregnancies with a medication abortion pill.

In Florida, the home of 21 military bases, the governor supports a six-week abortion ban. He may not know that a third of women don’t even know they’re pregnant until after six weeks.

These cruel policies are part of an escalating war on access to reproductive care, and we cannot allow our military readiness to become collateral damage.

A recent study from RAND Corporation found that Dobbs could increase attrition, decrease readiness and harm military recruiting. And that’s after the Pentagon just had its worst recruiting year since the Vietnam War ended.

A third policy gives service members more time to tell their commanding officer they are pregnant, giving them more time to decide if they want to carry a baby to term, and give women in uniforms more privacy to make the decision.

For example, the Pentagon is now considering whether to move the US Space Command from Colorado, which protects abortion access, to Alabama, which criminalizes it. The Pentagon considers a number of factors when it makes base decisions, including available parking spaces and housing affordability.

What are the things that are not on the list? Whether the state prohibits abortion, imprisons doctors who perform them or turns its residents into bounty hunters against women.

Nine months after Dobbs it can be easy to feel powerless as one state after another takes aim at the right to choose. But here is one specific way that Biden can hold the line, strengthen our readiness and defend the freedom of service women who spend every day defending ours.