British soldier gives birth on frontline

Graham2001

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Graham2001
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This is an issue I cannot remember being bought up in all the debate over female soldiers, I'm really not sure what to say about it, though I'm sure this sort of thing has happened in the past.

A British soldier has given birth while serving on the frontline in Afghanistan after not realising she was pregnant.

The 21-year-old female soldier, who has not been identified, gave birth to a baby boy five weeks premature at Camp Bastian in the Helmand province yesterday...
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Ninemsn, 20 September, 2012

http://news.ninemsn.com.au/world/8535947/british-soldier-gives-birth-on-frontline
 
During the first Gulf War, I was working in Saudi Arabia and got to know a number of US troops, including a female lieutenant. Her husband was also a serving officer in Saudi, in a different unit . During the build up, they managed a couple of days leave together and - you guessed it- she got pregnant. Turns out that deliberately becoming pregnant on active service is an offense- comparable to a self-inflicted wound in some ways. She was rotated home. I often wondered what the final outcome of it all was.
 
I'm sure some misogynists will embrace this as proof that women are unsuitable for battle. It didn't happen in battle (Conan won't be reincarnated yet), and a number of medical conditions can make a soldier unfit for battle, so it's not like surprise births are some kind of unique soldier-stopper. In addition, something like 1 in every 5,000 pregnancies are mystery pregnancies, so the chances of this being a common problem are pretty damn slim.

"Almost 200 British troops have discovered they were pregnant at war since 2003"

And I guess this is an issue for some people, but we're talking about 200 soldiers out of 71,560 (2009 stats, Google wasn't helpful) in nine years, and that's pretty slim. Sex ed, condoms and some kind of sanctions against the people who do it deliberately; not much else they can do.
 
Soapy Sam said:
During the first Gulf War, I was working in Saudi Arabia and got to know a number of US troops, including a female lieutenant. Her husband was also a serving officer in Saudi, in a different unit . During the build up, they managed a couple of days leave together and - you guessed it- she got pregnant. Turns out that deliberately becoming pregnant on active service is an offense- comparable to a self-inflicted wound in some ways. She was rotated home. I often wondered what the final outcome of it all was.
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I would think the "deliberately" part would be hard to prove, assuming that there's not a requirement for celibacy.
 
Graham2001 said:
This is an issue I cannot remember being bought up in all the debate over female soldiers, I'm really not sure what to say about it, though I'm sure this sort of thing has happened in the past.
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There are a number of recorded cases of babies been born on on royal navy ships in the middle of battle. In every known case the child survived although there was at least one case where both parents were killed during the battle.
 
IIRC, the U/S. military sends the mother on some kind of compassionate leave, 90 days maybe, then she serves out her enlistment later. Kid stays with gran ma, or such. Plus some kind of sanctions against Mom, duty station Point Barrow perhaps.
 
The kid gets a cool place of birth on their birth certificate.
 
Well, that woman will hands-down stop every conversation in which mothers try to one-up each other about the size of the baby, the intensity of labor, the lack of epidural.

"Yeah? I was carrying a rifle into a firefight in the middle of IEDs and RPGs."
 
Wanted for questioning:

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WildCat said:
Usually such women are morbidly obese.
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Yeah but the absence of period for 7 *months* should be a pretty damn hint for anybody with even an average intellect. Even if the woman had irregular period they should not stop for 7 months, without her asking medical advice, I dunno, to a doctor which would test for pregnancy first.
 
mikedenk said:
Denial.
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That was the verdict in this house too.

Apart from the huge belly, missed periods and maybe morning-sickness, there's the fact that the baby is kicking pretty vigorously by this stage. I can only suppose she was dreading reality for some reason.
 
Small baby, born premature, Why should there be a 'huge belly'?

BBC Radio2 did a feature on it on the Jeremy Vine show yesterday. There were several callers who all gave their accounts of giving birth and up until then not realising they were pregnant.
 
GlennB said:
That was the verdict in this house too.

Apart from the huge belly, missed periods and maybe morning-sickness, there's the fact that the baby is kicking pretty vigorously by this stage. I can only suppose she was dreading reality for some reason.
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You think being stuck in a war might have something to do with it?

Seriously: Chances are she didn't want to be pregnant - if she had been pregnant to get out, she would have known and gotten out, after all.

Then, you are probably under a lot of stress of different kinds - good explanations for a few missed periods.
 
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