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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

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No, 2.7% Rather higher than maternal mortality rates, even pre-industrial.

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.

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?

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.

That's a politicized-looking source

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.

Now WWII... WWII had at least a 17% military death rate. Not for the US, but overall for all soldiers

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"?

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.

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.