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Well, the flip answers on here don't seem to be based in reality, so why not throw one more stupid log on the bonfire of stupidity?
I work in a place that is 99.9% female and, surprise surprise, from time to time staff members get pregnant. There is currently one girl ("girl" from my POV, she's in her early to mid twenties) who is having her first child and she's very sick with it.
The guys on here have little to no conception (ha!) of the reality of pregnancy or the kind of physical toll it exacts. I'm not pro-contraception and I'm staunchly anti-abortion, but becoming and being pregnant is not "fulfil biological imperative" as easily as "I'm hungry, I need to eat something". There's a lot goes into creating and growing a new human being out of your own body, which never seems to be taken into consideration.
Do men who are subject to the draft have to turn up every week to a boot camp training them in case of war? Because "men = draft: women = pregnant" would be more like that in reality.
Dang it, all the guys on here carelessly proclaiming women are selfish carousel riders who should be compelled by the government weaponising social disapproval into having babies should have to undergo compulsory couvade linked to a real pregnancy (might be your spouse, a family member, or just at random out of the general population if you haven't managed to persuade some woman to throw her lot in with you). Get AI to work on how we can make that happen.
Once you, Dear Reader who suggests women should be barred from higher education and work and steered into getting married to man of parents' choice as soon as she leaves school at eighteen to be pregnant by twenty at the latest, experience the joys of pregnancy and childbirth in your own body, we'll see how enthusiastic you are about "women need to have their liberty stripped and be directed into Fulfil Biological Destiny", more than once.
Women of past generations had anything from six to thirteen children. I want you to go through eight couvades and then tell me you'll sign up for a ninth.
I've read a lot of what other people have been writing in this thread, and I can't find anyone who's asserting that pregnancy is a walk in the park. Obviously it's extremely rough on women's bodies in a number of ways.
But we're not looking at in a vacuum though. We're comparing it to war, and saying pregnancy is clearly worse than being a frontline infantryman is where my credulity strains. My response to this comment can be cross-applied here pretty much as-is.
My credulity is strained by "men are compulsorily enrolled for the draft, so women should be compulsorily enrolled for pregnancy".
If you're supposed to get pregnant, this is not the same thing as "well I might get called up for a war but probably not unless things get really bad". If the guys are all being frontline infantrymen in shooting wars, then yes that's equivalent (even Chesterton made the same equivalence!)
But that's not what is being presented.
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