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No - again, I think it comes from a deep-seated intuition that the body is a temple, something private and sacred; that it would be unclean and abominable for anyone to invade or modify your body without your consent. I am struggling to explain this without repeating myself - but a substantial portion of mankind finds it intuitive that having your body interfered with is traumatizing and wrong in a kind of metaphysical way that you can't crush down into utils and compare to other forms of harm. Throughout history, it has been considered self-evident that an honorable woman would rather die than be raped - that a woman who has been raped, even if there is no pregnancy, even if there is no social shame, has suffered a much more grievous and deeper harm than the amount of physical pain endured during the act.
Ergo, it seems intuitively, primally obvious to me that forcing a woman to bear something within her womb, within her most private organs, against her will, is wrong, disgusting, taboo, in a way that's not just quantitatively but qualitatively different from forcing a male or female soldier to risk his/her life in battle. I would feel the same disgust if a mad scientist tried to implant a fetus inside a non-consenting man.
And yet, fascinatingly enough, female genital mutilation is considered evil and immoral, but circumcision is regularly practiced. Tells me all I need to know about the "body is a temple" argument.
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Join the army and try making a bodily autonomy argument at any point, see how it goes.
I'm not suggesting you actually run this experiment, and I don't support some sort of forced pregnancy regime(although there are, on the contrary, lots of lower hanging fruit coercive options available to western societies. Forced marriage for cohabiting couples makes a lot more sense, statistically most women have babies once they get that ring).
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And I'm saying again that the realities of being drafted mean men are already subjected to violation of the body as a temple. Sure, having the government inseminate women would be gross and weird and terrible. But it's also terrible to have the government say that men have to go to the frontline where enemies can shoot them full of holes.
Personally, I could barely tolerate my son being drafted against his will, abused as cannon fodder and killed during a war. I'd help him dodge the draft, depending on the circumstances.
But if someone drafted my daughter's womb against her will, I'd try to kill the enforcers or inseminators. I feel this is a natural, typical instinct for most fathers, population TFR be damned. This is why drafting women's wombs is impossible, most fathers would perceive it as rape of their daughters.
And the fact most mothers do not perceive what you've described as rape of their sons is the entire problem.
It's either genetic or embedded deep within all major cultures. The mothers of a tribe that kept their sons away from war were conquered by their neighbors. The genes or cultures that did not see male drafting as rape survived as they had bigger armies, the losers were enslaved or assimilated into the conquerers.
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Apparently soldiers had a 1.8% chance of being killed in WWII, 0.5% in the Vietnam War.
Gestating and giving birth to an infant historically imposed an equivalent or greater mortality risk; today it still entails some risk of death plus a far more substantial risk of serious long-term illness and chronic pain but also a 100% chance of:
existing for nearly a year with a large foreign organism living inside your abdomen, whom you can feel displacing your innards, rolling around, stretching and thrashing, scratching, eventually squeezing the air out of you, and you cannot stop it doing this or get a break for even a minute
Having your cognitive and motivational systems irreversibly remodeled, on a basic biochemical level, in ways decidedly not aligned with your own individual flourishing
Being forced into an unwilled emotional bond that will break your heart many times whether you raise the child or not
Having your body permanently physically disfigured and reduced in function, including your metabolism and capacity for sleep
Having your tissues contaminated with someone else's cells, which will stay there and fuck with you for the rest of your life
Don't get me wrong, I've done this several times and it was worth it with someone I loved and chose. But to have been forcibly impregnated with some random guy's state-created offspring would have been nightmarish and life-ruining. To match those levels of "gross and weird and terrible," the male draft would have to look more like The Human Centipede than Band of Brothers.
This comparison describes pregnancy from the inside in the most visceral possible terms, but then describes the draft from the outside as "only a 0.5–1.8% death risk."
But the horror of conscription is not exhausted by your chance of being killed. Being drafted means the state seizes your body, removes your freedom, ships you away from your family, subjects you to total institutional discipline, and may order you to kill strangers, watch friends be dismembered, be shelled, step on mines, burn, drown, lose limbs, suffer brain injury, be captured, tortured, or come home with permanent psychological damage and moral injury. It also means you may be forced to participate in acts you find evil under threat of prison or execution.
So I don't disagree with you that forced pregnancy is horrific. But I'd argue that conscription still comes out handily ahead as the most extreme violation of bodily autonomy states have ever imposed, ahead of mandated pregnancies if they were to be implemented.
I feel like the slapfight over the comparative suffering of forced pregnancy (on average) versus forced conscription is emerging as a dead-end - partly because we naturally underweight suffering that applies only to other people,, but also because I was trying to argue that forced pregnancy is a qualitatively different and morally reprehensible category of atrocity, similar to forms of intimate violation that are also off-limits for the state to impose on male draftees (like institutionalized rape or brain implants or invasive medical experimentation). You can squint and describe any unwanted experience as a "violation of bodily autonomy," but there's a meaningful difference. Spartan-style "all draftees owe their CO two rounds of bottoming" would never fly as official policy, even if the colonel promises he'll be gentle and make it fun.
Can I follow up, though, on this point?
On one level, I fully agree that this would be horrible to be asked to do - less the physical risk of severe injury in defense of those you love (which women should also be willing to do), but certainly the moral injury part. On the other hand, I also feel as though "Aggression and physical violence are very wrong, and harm the perpetrators as much as the victims" is a surprisingly feminist talking point? (Patriarchy Hurts Men, Too!)
If most men really find it horrific to be asked to do violence, risk injury and physically harm or kill enemies, how do we account for the fact that they voluntarily spend hours and $$$ fantasizing about this in videogames, or that Fight Club remains a middle-aged male fantasy, or that little boys find ways to make toys violent and play at injuring others? "They can't insult us like that, let's get our weapons and go fuck them up" is like the purest young man's instinct ever: in general, one of the most consistent behaviors among men everywhere, from Papua New Guinea to downtown LA to ancient Greece, is their spontaneous formation of violence gangs to do organized lethal violence on other people. As I pointed out below, the existence of war itself suggests a strong revealed preference of men to perform warfare, because these things are very expensive and it sure as hell isn't women organizing them.
So, say we accept as true your claim that for a man, being made to fight physically alongside other men, to risk injury and hurt and kill enemies is a horrifying, extreme violation, the worst thing imaginable. Then why do y'all so consistently and avidly seek out this experience? That's a genuine question, not a gotcha: I really would love a male perspective on the question.
(The parallel spontaneous instinct in many women is for taking care of small children, I guess. You could readily get approval for draconian legislation drafting women into the Baby and Toddler Minding Corps. But virtually no little girls have a parallel draw toward experiencing physical pregnancy or going into labor.)
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No, 2.7% Rather higher than maternal mortality rates, even pre-industrial.
As for the rest, how about existing for years in, well, the jungles of Vietnam? Or some godforsaken island in the Pacific? How about the whole military training process, designed to break your spirit and break down your personality so you can be rebuilt into the military mold? Unwilling emotional bond with your squadmates? Yep, that too.
And you think Band of Brothers wasn't terrible enough? The original Easy Company had almost 47% killed in action.
That's a politicized-looking source, so I think it'd be worth investigating both sites' math to figure out how one is getting .5% and the other 2.7%. However, even if you accept the higher figure, built into the desired >2.1 TFR is the expectation that women will undergo multiple pregnancies. Even if per-pregnancy mortality is at the premodern standard ~1.5-2%, you'd have been looking at 5-6%+ mortality over three or more pregnancies. I'm not aware of many men having been drafted into multiple wars in succession over their lifetime.
Although we should note that plenty of people are actually born in rural Vietnam and live there perforce their whole lives, still "getting drafted was no big deal" will never be a position I endorse. Nonetheless I think there's a fundamental moral difference between discomfort, threat or suffering and violation in the sense of being dehumanized and fully robbed of agency through tan extended, unnatural cancellation of your bodily or mental boundaries.
You can consider the difference for yourself by asking whether it'd be acceptable if the draft officially entailed male draftees getting raped for months by officers, or chemically brainwashed/ mind-control-chipped for life, or forced to incubate botflies and tapeworms for some military project. Perhaps none of those things would be even as uncomfortable as boot camp, but I think there would be widespread rejection of drafting for those purposes.
Your source just pulled a figure from the air.
Now WWII... WWII had at least a 17% military death rate. Not for the US, but overall for all soldiers. WWI, 12%
Comparing fighting in any of these wars with pregnancy (noting we are not, in fact in pre-modern times) and finding the fighting to be less onerous is not reasonable.
I'd be interested to see the source and the math, but we've also now fully moved away from the original question, which was not, is/was war more dangerous than pregnancy?, but rather, are there limits to the kinds of atrocities governments may deliberately impose on their citizens in the name of "urgent public need"?
As I said, I think we've fully stopped debating the draft by this point, so I don't know what wider claim this is intended to support. Is the idea to justify forced impregnation by pointing out that men are the ones who have to suffer and die fighting wars? I'm less sympathetic because wars are also fully originated and created by men, in obedience to men's instincts, from start to finish. Presumably because many guys are hormonally programmed to like them (certainly many little boys do). Anybody who's upset about the horrifying pan-military casualty rate in WWII should come for Hitler, Churchill, de Gaulle, Mussolini, Tojo, Stalin, or any of their thousands of all-male military brass who collaborated at massive trouble and public expense to make WWII happen.
Not to go all hippie, but if men really did find fighting wars "onerous," they could just... not start them.
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