Deployed US Navy Has A Pregnancy Problem, And It’s Getting Worse
This is part of a story we have attempted to put a sharper focus on over the past several years of the Obama presidential disaster.
The article from the Daily Caller deals with one aspect of the unsurprising consequences of the “social experiment” inflicted upon our armed forces in the midst of sharp reductions in military spending spearheaded by Obama and abetted by GOP establishment morons. Of all of Obama’s many dangerous and disastrous appointments, the former Secretary of the Navy, Ray Mabus may be the worst.
Mabus was a grim joke from the moment he was appointed, as he obviously set out to do as much damage as possible to the actual mission of the Navy, focusing instead on making it a model for a gay, feminist, “green” experimentation.
We have hoped for serious analysis of how much of the sharply decreased funding of all armed forces branches were diverted to spending for “diversity” and “anti- sexual harassment” training, recruitment of transgenders, changing of military specialty job titles to “gender neutral”, powering of navy vessels with “vegetable oil” at 10 times the cost of conventional “fossil fuels”, and other hidden costs such as that illustrated in this story.
Maybe some day, America will get the honest, straightforward report on just how much serious damage in so many ways (well beyond what we cite here) Barack Obama inflicted on national security, USA global leadership, and the world.
Maybe some day. DLH
Excerpts from the Richard Pollock article at the Daily caller:
A record 16 out of 100 Navy women are reassigned from ships to shore duty due to pregnancy, according to data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group. . . .
Overall, women unexpectedly leave their stations on Navy ships as much as 50% more frequently to return to land duty, according to documents obtained from the Navy. The statistics were compiled by the Navy Personnel Command at the request of TheDCNF, covering the period from January 2015 to September 2016.
The evacuation of pregnant women is costly for the Navy. Jude Eden, a nationally known author about women in the military who served in 2004 as a Marine deployed to Iraq said a single transfer can cost the Navy up to $30,000 for each woman trained for a specific task, then evacuated from an active duty ship and sent to land. That figure translates into $115 million in expenses for 2016 alone.
“A pregnancy takes you out of action for about two years. And there’s no replacement,” said Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, a nonpartisan public policy organization. “So everybody else has to work all that harder,” adding that on small ships and on submarines, “you really have a potential crew disaster.” . . .
The Obama administration understated the pregnancy problem throughout its eight years and even suppressed some data about the impact of its “gender-neutral” policies on the Navy.
For decades, for instance, the Navy published results from exhaustive surveys of 25,000 men and women in a document called the “Navy Pregnancy and Parenthood Survey.”
The reports once were 75 to 100 pages long and disclosed attitudes among men and women and their behavior. However, the Obama administration published only brief two to three-page summaries from 2012 onward. . . .
“The military has been tight-lipped over the years about these numbers. They don’t like to publicize them,” Eden told TheDCNF.
The Navy has been dogged for years by lingering claims that some women get pregnant simply to avoid deployment.
“We all know that happens. Women do it to avoid deployment,” Eden told TheDCNF.
. . .
“Since benefits offered to recruits who are women are so very generous, it almost becomes an incentive,” said Donnelly. “One feminist advocate many years ago referred to the military as a ‘Mecca for single moms.’”
“I think there are so many carrots. The military has become a modern-day jobs program,” Eden said. . . .
In May 2015, Admiral Michelle Howard announced a quota of 25% women on all ships. “We’re going back and looking at the ships — all of them — and what percentage of women are on the ships. Over time, we’ll modernize them to make sure we get to about 25 percent on each ship,” she said.
Former Navy Secretary Ray Mabus in September 2015 pushed the new policy, stating that the Navy SEALs and all other combat jobs in the Navy should be open to women, with no exemptions as part of the Pentagon’s new “gender-neutral” employment policy.
Eden believes the policy of increasing women on ships results in failure. “It’s bad policy when you think of ships that have to be battle-ready and then have to transfer women off for pregnancy — something that has to do with controlled behavior or voluntary behavior,” she said.
It is unclear how President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis will handle women in the military. He has been a skeptic, but also said during his confirmation hearing he would support a combat role for women.
It’s too bad the term “anchor baby” is already taken. When a male sailor leaves port, he tells his wife, “I’ll see you in a year.” The female seaman (semen?) tells her mate, “I’ll be back in 20 weeks.”
In a perfect world a pregnancy test would be given a month before deployment. Any pregnancy after ship launch would be a discipline offence. Pregnancy leave time would not count as time served. You receive benefits for completing your “hitch”. Why should someone get credit for serving a 4 year term if they spent 2 of those years on pregnancy leave?