Drafting Women: Long-term Cultural Consequences

Drafting Women: Long-term Cultural Consequences May 23, 2016

Lost in the latest egalitarian nonsense about drafting women to serve in the military are two concerns I have about the long-term impact on us as a culture.

 

Photo Credit: Unsplash
Photo Credit: Unsplash

Aside from the scientific arguments about weakening our fighting force, valid though they are, and the complete collapse of principles by so many on what used to be the ideological right, two glaring concerns remain with drafting women to serve in the military:

  1. Our society needs mothers who are not trained killers. Men and women are different, not just anatomically (in spite of the the confusion recently), but in terms of how we are hard-wired within. Women are naturally better at nurturing. Not that men can’t or that some women aren’t. But to use a crude analogy: women are better wired to be teacups. Men are better wired to be chainsaws. Each excels at different things and performs best in different ways. Try sipping tea with a chainsaw and your teeth will pay a high price. Try cutting down a tree with a teacup. You get the idea. It’s a basic analogy that, like all analogies is flawed. But men and women are different, though neither is inferior. Our society needs mothers to nurture future generations without having to cope with flashbacks from the horrors of a war they were forced to fight. Frommys can never be as good as mommies. We need mothers who have not been required to become trained killers to nurture our children because they do it best.
  2. We need women to make babies. It’s the biology, stupid. We need to reproduce, something we are only barely doing now at replacement levels. If we force our future mothers to serve in the military, many of them will die. Once they die, they cannot have children. That’s how life works. By drafting our daughters, we are necessarily decreasing the number of females who can reproduce.  When major wars come—and history assures us they will come—how many will we lose? Unlike men, women can only reproduce so quickly. That’s basic biology. Imagine if women had been drafted during World War II. Instead of nearly 400,000 male casualties, we might well have had 200,000 female casualties. Bye, bye, baby boomers. Combine that with our culture’s increasing disdain for having children over the last 40 years and the rise of the horror of abortion, and we might very well be in an unsustainable place as a culture. As it is, we are nearly there now.

Before we rush into coercing our daughters to become trained killers, maybe we should think through where this madness will leave us—not in the next election cycle, but a generation or two down the road.

Long after the self-serving politicians are gone.


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