The Senate Armed Services Committee is beginning to draft the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). This week, they will be marking it up in committee, where they can present amendments to add or strike language. In recent years, dangerous language has been inserted with the help of a few Republicans. We ask you to urge them not to make the same mistakes!
Previous Senate iterations of the NDAA included a provision that would require women ages 18-25 to register for the Selective Service. Senators ignored the fact that women do not have the same muscular and bone structures as men, and therefore, fewer women would be capable of qualifying for military service. Reports and studies have shown that men outperform women in strength and endurance. Even when they “meet the minimum requirements” for military service, women are injured at twice the rate of men, just as female athletes in high school and college sports suffer much higher rates of injury. Anyone sending young women off to war would be using them as cannon fodder.
Another harmful provision within last year’s Senate draft of the NDAA mandated insurance coverage of individuals seeking to use artificial reproductive technologies (ART). The language included a definition of ART that went well beyond IVF to cover cloning and experimenting with animal-human hybrids. Billions of taxpayer dollars should not fund unethical methods of junk science.
We want our Senators to know that drafting our daughters and covering unethical means of reproduction are non-starters. None of these policies make our defense strong and powerful. In fact, it wastes taxpayer money, depresses recruitment, and makes our military weaker.
Call or email the Senators who sit on the Senate Armed Services Committee today and urge them to keep language out of the National Defense Authorization Act that would draft our daughters and fund unethical artificial reproductive technologies.
