The good news is the Navy has embraced a more specific pregnancy policy and better addresses family-planning issues over the course of the last ten years.
The bad news is that Mother Nature still hasn’t joined the Navy and probably never will, which means conception will continue to assert itself as a challenge to those who are trying to efficiently manage this mixed-gender, sea-going service.
Females are going to get pregnant. It’s a basic fact of life. No matter where they are or what career field they happen to be in, pregnancy is always a possibility.
It’s in the personal management of those pregnancies and the families taking shape from them that means all the difference in the world between women who are professionals and those who merely abuse the system.
Traditionally, active-duty pregnancies have had a bad rep and everybody knows it. Women in the Navy have been notorious for taking advantage of pregnancy in order to get lighter duty and to escape deployment.
But let’s not forget that male sailors have been known to take advantage of pregnancy and family problems, too. They routinely get time off the job whenever they ask for it to tend to their wives’ needs or those of their children.
Are single male or female non-parent sailors afforded such luxuries in terms of their own private lives? Hardly. If anything, they’re the ones who usually end up having to take up the slack for sailors who are too busy catering to the needs of dependents to meet their own obligations to the Navy!
What it all comes down to, essentially, is professionalism.
Men and women who join the military for the right reasons know they have a job to do and a responsibility to do that job to the best of their capabilities. Period.
