I remember during the mid-1980s a poll was done in US Army Europe among the female soldiers: It asked, Do you think that you will be evacuated with the wives & children in case of war? 80 percent said “Yes.” so much for most females wanting to fight in the front or rear areas. This has apparently changed somewhat during the last 10 years, but I wonder what the pregnancy rate among deploying units is? How many of the female soldiers get preganant so that they will not deploy to a combat zone?
This info is a little old, but here’s what I found:
“A 1996 report by Patricia Thomas of the Navy Personnel Research and Development Center in San Diego described the sexual and reproductive patterns of several thousand women aboard fifty naval ships. Their rates of pregnancy were about comparable to those of civilian women of the same age. neither the strict legal barriers nor the relatively draconian conditions of the Navy had apparent impact in inhibiting a general American pattern.
Thomas did not find, as some critics had claimed, that women became pregnant in order to escape duty. Her evidence for this was necessarily indirect—there were similar responses to questions about stress and depression among pregnant and nonpregnant women—but her analysis is more respectful of her informants than one that defines them as malingerers. Perhaps some were. Then why would roughly the same number of Navy women become pregnant as civilian?
She found that 27 percent of pregnancies of women based on ships were planned, whereas nearly half shore-based ones were. More ship women used contraceptives than shore women, though, remarkably, 41 percent used none. One hypothesis offered by naval medical personnel is that the irregular schedules and strenuous work on board ship caused women to forget to take their contraceptive pills.”