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I think you're underselling the "invasive" point. The idea of forcing someone to go through pregnancy triggers a particular kind of disgust and sympathy in me - it might not be more harmful or evil than forcing someone to fight in a war in an 'objective' sense, but it feels debased and inhumane, belonging to the same category as rape or Mengele-style medical experimentation. Certainly, a legal mandate of pregnancy, at least one that's not enforced through direct sexual violence, would be on the milder end of that spectrum - but the violation of bodily autonomy is still a very particular kind of harm, and one can have a moral intuition that the entire category should be strictly taboo in a civilized society, regardless of what other kinds of harm the government is sometimes empowered to inflict for the greater good.
(Intuitions may differ about whether forced pregnancy falls into that category, but I do think the vast majority of humans would agree that there are particularly 'unclean' kinds of harm that the government should never implement, even in pursuit of its self-preservation; that there are actions so vile that if it's a choice between death and performing them, death is the nobler choice. If a maniac demanded that you rape your preteen daughter or else he'd kill your family, what would you choose? The view that the government cannot compel women to bear children is, IMO, a perfectly straightforward example of that: "if it comes to that, better to be a demographically dwindling nation than a nation of institutional rapists".)
Compared to the reality of being drafted where a man might at any point have their leg blown off?
I don't see why you're claiming that pregnancy is so much vastly worse than warfare. I don't think your sentiment is uncommon, but I'd think it comes from 1) this hasn't been done before, so the Overton window still sees it as beyond the pale, and 2) it would be done against women, and humans naturally want to protect women from everything.
These are not particularly compelling reasons.
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 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.
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.
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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