Why would a woman in such a program have less of a chance of survival than a soldier in conflict. It would be quite the opposite in fact.
In such times, a fertile woman would be a valuable resource and would be protected. Of course there is going to be a mental/emotional/spiritual cost to what she will go through. And yes, there are potential dangers to pregnancy and childbirth - but they pale in comparison to that of warfare.
“Why would a woman in such a program have less of a chance of survival than a soldier in conflict. It would be quite the opposite in fact.
In such times, a fertile woman would be a valuable resource and would be protected. Of course there is going to be a mental/emotional/spiritual cost...” [sipow, post 29]
There’s a misconception here, of what the military is and does.
Civilians rarely give the military a thought unless a war occurs. Even then, most of them think in terms of footsoldiers toting small arms. The latter is strongly preferred by Americans, who believe our independence was secured by citizen soldiers. That was only partly true in the 1780s, and “the militia” has come to mean less and less in the total military picture, ever since.
The armed services don’t fight every day of the week. In between conflict, there are years, even generations, when not much happens. The regular military has used these slow moments to regroup, retrain, research, develop new stuff and procedures, theorize about what’s next.
The central aspect of military service for the organized professional military is the organization, not the war. This has become increasingly true since World War One, as industrial production and technological advances brought more mechanization and more specialization to the armed forces. Organizations - infantry divisions, armored squadrons, air wings, ships’ crews - train and equip, go forth to battle, then come home to clean up the mess and make sense of what happened. Individuals may perish, but the outfit lives on. The war may be over, but the outfit has gone home to get ready for the next one.
And even during full-scale conflict, many members of the military aren’t directly exposed to the shooting. During World War Two - revered as a high point by many on the Right - there were six soldiers behind the lines for every front-line trigger-puller: supply clerks, radio operators, construction crews, mess sergeants, airlifter crews, merchant seamen. And clerk-typists to keep the paperwork straight.
Guess what? Many had been drafted. Most lived, but the disruption visited on their lives was no less than that of anyone else. And perhaps less invasive, less disruptive than the (fictional) situations imagined in _The Handmaid’s Tale_ or _Implosion_.
I confess I have no idea how real women of today would react to the kind of national-level program theorized in such works of fiction, but I find the forced-breeding concept to be at least as invasive, as injurious to the sense of self and just as big a violation of personal liberties as any draft, or any concept of universal military service (which we’ve never instituted, totally). The Nazi Germans, who fussed more over population dynamics and racial “purity” than any other nation of those days, did not go so far; they encouraged and rewarded large numbers of births to suitable parents, and slyly let the SS and other favored groups of males sire “Aryan” children as often as possible. They also stole children from families if they looked Aryan enough. But they did not institute “breeding hospitals” filled with fertile women.