Oh, I know what the anti-feminists are going to say: “Women have always wanted equal rights (i.e. voting) but not equal responsibility (i.e. being drafted).”



Here's the thing, though. Women *did* have responsibility. Theodore Roosevelt, for instance, made a speech saying that women’s responsibility was to give birth to the next generation, and men’s was to go to war, and that both men and women should be equally shamed if they shirked their duties. Both men and women were expected to give blood for their nation.



I'll address the whole "but childbirth is voluntary and being drafted into war is not!" bit in a second, but first I'd like to say that the roles make sense. Men and women are physically dimorphic. Obviously only women can give birth, & there's also the fact that men are much brutely stronger than women which makes them more equipped for warfare. Studies show that although men and women do NOT differ much in PSYCHOLOGICAL traits such as assertiveness, men and women are completely physically dimorphic with almost no overlap when it comes to brute strength.



Research shows that the average man has higher brute strength than 99% of women, and also that men have 90% higher upper body strength on average, and 65% higher lower body strength.



Yes there are technically ways now that women can partake in war using technology. But it’s precisely that: technology gave them that opportunity to engage in an activity that they're not built for. Should we now make technology so that men can go through childbirth? For equality?



As a note, the brute strength differences do not mean that men are superior to, or even overall stronger than, women. It is just that men and women generally store their strength in different ways. Women’s strength is more internalized - better immune systems, stronger resistance to cold and famine, etc because our bodies need to be healthy enough to gestate, give birth to, and breastfeed a baby... Brute strength is the big exception. Men’s strength is more externalized - aimed at protecting, etc.

(I cite all of my sources for my claims about physical dimorphism - men's strengths and women's strengths - in a Tumblr post here: https://uteropolis.tumblr.com/post/139039467450/why-drafting-women-into-war-wouldnt-be)

And if you don’t think that giving birth is one of the biggest strengths out there, then I don’t know what to tell you. Of course a male supremacist would say “well that’s because men’s bodies aren’t built for it.” To which I respond: well the reason we don’t have the brute strength you do is because our bodies aren’t built for it. We’re built for other things - which are arguably more important than what you’re built for. (If there weren’t people capable of giving birth, there’d be no brutely strong people to begin with, because no one would exist.)



So women already had the responsibility to give birth; you want to give them the responsibility to go to war on top of that? That’s inequality. It’s causing a double burden men don’t have to deal with.



There's the fact that the draft is forcible and childbirth is not. However, even if we ignore the fact that there are people out there actively fighting for women to be forced to give birth against their will, answer me this: then what about the men who are drafted but *want* to be drafted? It’s not against their will. Should those men have to go through something in addition to that, against their will, just so that they can experience something against their will, like the other men being drafted? Even if women who give birth, and men who desire to go to war, are not being forced to fulfill their civic duties against their will, they're still fulfilling them, and shouldn't be required to take on the civic duties of other people on top of that. (4 out of 5 women give birth by the way.)



By the way, the reason there was never a draft for women to give birth was because the US government never saw a need for there to be one. I totally wouldn’t put it past the fucked up US government to draft women to give birth if there was a population shortage.



And that would be wrong, if it did happen. It is a violation of bodily autonomy. But if there was a draft for women to give birth I wouldn’t fight for men also to be drafted in the name of “equality” (if we can figure out a way to land on the moon, we can figure out a way to get men to give birth). I’d work to get rid of the whole damn thing altogether.



Likewise for the draft for men to go to war. The solution isn’t to give women a double burden so that they have to deal with men’s civil responsibilities on top of their own. Again, inequality. The goal is to make it so that neither men nor women are chained to the civil duties that they have been tied to for the past couple centuries. Neither men nor women should be drafted to do anything they don't want to do.

However, if people are insistent upon drafting women to go to war in the name of "equality", then I seriously propose that we devise a way for men to become pregnant and give birth, and menstruate, in the name of "equality." I'm not joking. We can figure out how. We figured out a way to land on the moon. That is the *only* way I'll support drafting women to go into the war.



Here's an awesome quote from here:

https://squaretwo.org/Sq2ArticleHudsonWomenCombat.html

"I oppose [Selective Service registration for women] because women already sacrifice more for their country than men do, and women should not be asked to bear even more. There should be parity between men and women in the work of protecting our country and giving it a future. Selective Service registration for women would undo that parity, placing an unjustly heavy burden on women, and making their burden far heavier than that of men[…]

What, at a minimum, must a nation have to survive? It must have protection[…] But protection is not enough for a nation to survive. A protected nation will nevertheless die out in the space of a generation if there is no reproduction. Only through reproduction does a nation have a future[…]

From 1776 onwards, more women have died or been seriously harmed in or incident to childbirth than men have died or been wounded in battle.

For example, in 2012, over 700 US women died in childbirth, with another 52,000 suffering a profound bodily harm, such as acute renal failure, stroke, heart failure, or aneurysms. In 2012, 310 American soldiers died in Afghanistan, with less than 4,000 wounded. Indeed, the maternal mortality rate in the US is now double what it was 25 years ago."

Do you see that? Over twice as many women died and over 10 times as many women have been wounded in childbirth recently than men in war. Far more women than men have been dying lately during their fulfillment of their traditional civic "blood sacrifices". Yet we expect women to take on men's civic duties, too, on top of that? That is anything but equality.