Soldier & Baby Mum: When Worlds Collide

Hoover Institute Research Fellow Mary Eberstadt, willing to incur some public wrath, valiantly tackles a sacred cow: The American military's propensity for sending mommies off to war zones, and the consequences of such policies.

She writes, " ... American laws like most others delineate what kind of civilization ours is. And currently, ours is one in which military and political and cultural leaders appear to believe that there is nothing intrinsically wrong about deploying mothers away from their children and into the wars. This apparent near-consensus brings us to another reason the status quo has continued without public protest: because the parties that ordinarily might be expected to be paying attention to this military-social experiment have sidelined themselves for reasons of their own."

Read the whole essay, and ponder the titanic clash between equality and reality.

Update: Will Grigg has written about maternity and the military in "Leviathan's Orphans."

'Nother Update: A U.S. Serviceman, who lives in the Heartland, shared his thoughts with me on this one: "When I was in Iraq, there was even a mothers-of-young-children support group composed of soldiers who were mothers of young children, to help each other get through the deployment while missing their children. Now is that not sick and insane?

But there's not much criticism of it, in part because too many conservatives are just gung-ho about the military and are not willing to question anything about the military for fear of not supporting the troops. They seem oblivious to the fact that today's military is a PC-run organization."

'Nother, nother update: Pastor Baldwin discusses another troubling angle to this story - military women and rape.