For US servicewomen, will end of Roe mean end of military career?

With 14 days and counting to go until her deployment to Afghanistan, Holly Alvarado realized she was pregnant – and she didn’t want to be. 

The 9/11 attacks and gratitude for a country that had welcomed her immigrant grandparents inspired Ms. Alvarado to join the Air Force. What she wanted was to go to war with her fellow troops. 

She also knew herself. “It was not a cold or bleak decision on my behalf – rather, a compassionate one for myself and life and potential I wanted in my own future.” 

But when she called the only abortion clinic in North Dakota, where she was stationed, they didn’t have any appointments before her flight to Afghanistan. 

The next closest possibility was Minnesota, which, like many states, requires women to receive lectures about potential consequences of the procedure – followed by a 24-hour waiting period to reflect on their choices – before being permitted to proceed. 

Because of high demand for scarce abortion services, Ms. Alvarado had to wait 72 hours between appointments. This constituted not only a professional risk but “an enormous financial burden.” 

To save money, she slept in her car for three nights, eating saltines and drinking Gatorade. To pay for the abortion, which military health insurance doesn’t cover, she maxed out her credit card. 

“I cannot reconcile that our government trusted me to hold weapons in protection of our country and serve as a respected member of our armed services, but could not trust me to make the right decision over my own body,” she told lawmakers in a February 2020 hearing. 

Should the Supreme Court overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling that legalized abortion – and a draft opinion leaked in May signals that justices may be preparing to do just that later this month – such scenarios could become increasingly common for military servicewomen, defense analysts say. Abortion would become illegal in about half of states, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which studies reproductive rights.

The second-order effects could portend a threat to national security, they warn, by prompting women to leave the military and making it more difficult – in an economy where filling the ranks is already a challenge – to recruit them in the first place.

In the hours after the Supreme Court memo was leaked, Pentagon officials pointed to potential risks of such a scenario. 

“We cannot be an effective military without the brave women who serve,” Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby told reporters. “We’d be literally cutting our readiness.”

In advance of the Supreme Court ruling, Pentagon leaders have been taking some steps to protect the women in their ranks. 

Military base clinics are banned by federal law from performing abortions, except in cases of rape or threat to the mother’s health, but the Army and Air Force have now put in place policies prohibiting commanders from denying leave to soldiers seeking one. 

With no such guarantees for other service branches, however, the Pentagon “absolutely should have a department-wide policy,” says former Air Force lawyer Rachel VanLandingham, now professor of law at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles. 

When health care depends on where you are stationed

When Ms. Alvarado’s abortion was complete, “I felt relief,” she said. She was decorated for her tour of duty in Afghanistan and honorably discharged from the military after reaching the rank of staff sergeant.

Yet with the advent of increasingly restrictive abortion laws across America, military analysts have doubts about whether future service members in similar circumstances will have the option of following Ms. Alvarado’s path, as difficult as it was. 

This is because 13 states including Texas – home to 20,000 active-duty servicewomen – have passed “trigger laws” to further limit or ban abortion should Roe v. Wade be overturned. 

What’s more, the junior troops who are most likely to be affected by abortion laws cannot travel outside designated local areas, let alone the states where they are stationed, without permission from their chain of command. 

Inconsistency in state laws means “the reproductive and health care rights” of service members are “dependent on their duty station,” a group of democratic senators wrote in a letter this year urging the Defense Department to guarantee troops access to abortion if it’s outlawed in states where they are based. 

Dr. Jeffrey Jensen, who served as a Navy physician from 1988 to 1992, says he saw firsthand the consequences of troops denied the “health security” of safe abortions.

While stationed overseas in the Philippines, where abortion is illegal, Dr. Jensen treated troops who developed infections after having back-alley procedures off base. “These are women who are just trying to serve their country,” says Dr. Jensen, who is now director of the Women’s Health Research Unit at the Oregon Health and Science University.

If nurses or officers’ spouses had a “crisis pregnancy, I could potentially manage that after hours. I had the skills and equipment to conduct procedures if I chose to,” he says. “But I felt very unable to help the people who needed the most help.”

Though some have pointed to medication abortion, which can be used up to 10 weeks of pregnancy, as a solution, such treatments still are difficult “if you’re in a barracks situation without a lot of privacy.” 

“Why aren’t we providing the very best care and the very best options to our military women?”

Military sexual assault

Such questions of privacy and control are magnified when pregnancies involve military sexual assault. 

When Kimberley Bailey was raped by a noncommissioned officer while serving as an Army medic at a U.S. base in Germany, she wasn’t planning on telling anyone. 

“He was well known in the hospital, and I was trying to pretend it never happened.” 

But when she became pregnant, “I didn’t have a choice – I knew I needed help.” 

Rather than attend to her needs, her commanders were determined to learn the details of the assault. “‘Were you drinking?’ was their first question. I had been. They said, ‘Well, we need to address that first,’ and put me into an administrative alcohol program.”

Commanders ultimately convinced Ms. Bailey to name her attacker (he had volunteered to be her group’s designated driver) and he was arrested.

Because she was facing retaliation at work and in the barracks for reporting the assault, when she learned she was pregnant, leaders gave her emergency leave to return to the United States. 

There, she debated ending the pregnancy. “I was adopted; I was the product of sexual assault myself,” she says. “It wasn’t the baby’s fault.” 

But after talking to her mother, and given the turmoil it was causing in her military life, she ended the pregnancy. Now the mother of three, Ms. Bailey says it was an agonizing decision that has since become a moral injury.

After she returned to Germany, the JAG officer asked whether she wanted to proceed with her attacker’s trial. “They said, ‘The only evidence you had was your baby.’” She dropped the charges and received no further counseling or care. 

“I thought at the time I made a good choice for myself because things went back to normal,” she says. “People started talking to me again.” 

The interconnection of work and home, privacy and public duty, inherent to military life make it vital for defense leaders to step up to better plan and care for the welfare of their most vulnerable troops, says Ms. VanLandingham, who as a young lieutenant stationed in South Korea was ordered to accompany a fellow servicewoman off base to obtain an illegal abortion. 

“I was terrified,” she recalls. “She was pretty calm. We drove back and never spoke about it again.” 

Since South Korea legalized abortion last year, “in a perverse reversal of events, if a woman in the U.S. military is seeking an abortion it’s often better to be overseas. It shows that we’ve really gone backward,” Ms. VanLandingham says.

“You join the military and you give up some of your rights – got it. But for women to be expected to give up even more,” she adds, “is just not fair.”