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"...even the wicked get worse than they deserve." - Willa Cather, One of Ours

Wednesday, June 16, 2004

Pregnant soldiers leaving Iraq, US "unaware of numbers"

PTI
Many U.S. women soldiers in Iraq are leaving the frontline and returning home, but the Pentagon does not want to reveal their numbers as the "embarrassing" statistic includes unwed mothers...

"U.S. Central Command is not tracking the number of troops who must leave the Iraq war theatre due to pregnancy, prompting military advocates to charge that the Pentagon wants to keep secret what could be an embarrassing statistic,"...

...One military police unit reported losing three women for that reason.

Lynndie England, the 21-year-old photographed holding a leash attached to a naked Iraqi prisoner, became pregnant during an affair with another soldier at the Abu Ghraib prison compound in Iraq...

...In May 2003, the Marine Corps was forced to bring a Marine back home after she gave birth on a Navy warship in the Persian Gulf. She told superiors that she did not know she was pregnant.

During the 1991 Persian Gulf war, the press branded the destroyer tender USS Acadia the “Love Boat” after 36 sailors — 10 percent of the women aboard — became pregnant while deployed in support of Operation Desert Storm.
After the England story became public, there was a slew of anecdotal stories that in some units in Iraq as many as 10% of female personnel have become pregnant since the invasion last spring. I suspect that the actual numbers will be much less unsettling, but the DoD's stonewalling on the issue doesn't make me very sanguine. This could become a huge management problem for the military.
Posted by: Zayphar / 6/16/2004 09:06:00 AM
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