Combat Pregnancies

Ever since the furor over the possibility of being court-martialed for getting pregnant in a combat zone, not much has been said about the issue of military women causing problems in Iraq when they get sent home early after being knocked-up.

Part of the problem with discussing it is that to my knowledge, nobody has ever had any numbers to work with. Nobody seems to have a clue how many women have actually been sent home.

But, finally, yesterday Stars and Stripes published an article with a chart detailing the number of medical evacuations and the reasons for them:

These numbers cover the time between October 2001 to September 2009. There were a total of 52,283 medical evacuations from combat zones and only 248 of them were for “pregnancy and childbirth”.

In other words, of all the medical evacuations since 2001, only .474% of them were for pregnant women.

POINT 4. Less than half of one percent!

That is unbelievably small.

Yes, they said that not all pregnancies were considered medical evacuations so clearly there were more than 248. But still. Even if there were two or three times that, it’s STILL a miniscule number compared to the total number of medical evacuations. It’s not the epidemic some people would lead you to believe.

And it’s practically the least of your worries when it comes to soldiers being sent home early from a war zone.