Beginning November 4, getting pregnant became illegal for some American women. Likewise, for men, getting someone pregnant. The law applied to anyone—soldier or civilian—serving under Maj. Gen. Anthony Cucolo iii, who commands America’s military in northern Iraq.

The reason is obvious. Pregnancy and war-making are incompatible. Army policy demands that a pregnant soldier in Iraq be evacuated within two weeks. “When a soldier becomes pregnant or causes a soldier to become pregnant through consensual activity,” explained Army spokesman Maj. Lee Peters, “the redeployment of the pregnant soldier creates a void in the unit and has a negative impact on the unit’s ability to accomplish its mission. Another soldier must assume the pregnant soldier’s responsibilities.”

That makes sense. Thus, under the new policy, careless individuals who put themselves above the mission would face punishment, which might include a court-martial and jail time. Military staff judge advocates reviewed and approved the policy.

Then it died in the water.

Feminists complained the rule was biased against women. The American Civil Liberties Union (aclu) said the solution was not to punish pregnancy, but to ensure soldiers had freer access to abortion services (“emergency contraception,” they call it). Then Gen. Raymond Odierno, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, rescinded the policy. Score one for sexually irresponsible soldiers.

Major General Cucolo implemented his policy to address a genuine problem. Of the 2 million Americans who have fought in this war since 2001, 11 percent have been women. And while the majority have stepped up to the challenge, the New York Times reports that “Military women and commanders say some women have timed their pregnancies to avoid deploying or have gotten pregnant in Iraq so they would be sent home.” The Army won’t release numbers on how many soldiers it has had to evacuate because of pregnancy.

This shakeup over pregnant soldiers came and went with barely a whisper amid a season of blustery news. But it put on display a whole host of problems—buried facts, wishful thinking, duplicity, doublespeak and deliberate deceit—that have accompanied the radical transformation over the past four decades of America’s all-male warrior military into an almost completely sex-integrated force. It raised some important questions with far-reaching ramifications.

First, there is the issue of sex among the soldiery. As soon as women were introduced to military academies in 1976, fraternization became rife and pregnancies quickly became widespread. To solve the problem, the services one by one lifted the policy of dismissing pregnant soldiers. Within a few years, they had saturated military life with sex education, introducing mandatory classes on human sexuality and readily dispensing contraceptives. This change took the time-honored sense of military life being hard, regimented, set apart, dedicated to austere principles of discipline and personal sacrifice in service to country—and replaced it with the perfumed atmosphere of flirtation, romance, jealousy, flings and trysts.

Charges of sexual harassment proliferated as soldiers adapted to the new reality. Single parenthood also became far more problematic, simply because single mothers are many times more likely than single fathers to have custody of their children. With fully 12.5 percent of servicewomen being single moms (not to mention one third of pregnant servicewomen being unmarried), children by the tens of thousands pay the price.

Next is the question of capability. You will never hear active military personnel say anything to suggest that women soldiers are any less capable or committed than their male counterparts. Any such statement could cost a man his job. But the fact is, the average woman is almost 5 inches shorter and over 30 pounds lighter (with closer to 40 fewer pounds of muscle and 6 more pounds of fat) than the average man. She has less than half of his upper-body strength, 20 percent less aerobic capacity, and lighter, brittler bones. She cannot run or jump as far; last as long; grip as well; push, pull, lift or carry as much. The military has compensated for this by softening physical training standards and revising certain job descriptions. Still, women soldiers have higher rates of medical nonavailability than men, as well as attrition rates that average 36 percent higher than those of men.

Officials consistently deny that women cannot perform at a man’s level. They publicly praise women as being their top performers, their most indispensable soldiers. Such was the logic behind Major General Cucolo’s pregnancy policy. “The message to my female soldiers is that I need you for the duration,” he said in an interview. “Please think before you act.”

But in total contradiction, military leaders will also say that women discharged from active duty for getting pregnant have no negative effect on combat readiness. Thus, the military can afford to prioritize individual reproductive rights over unit cohesion.

These simply cannot both be true. But this is a prime example of the conflicted, oxymoronic thinking that has produced a military culture of doublespeak. “It’s becoming like Mao’s Cultural Revolution,” ex-Army officer John Hillen says. “Everybody knows it’s a system built on a thousand little lies, but everybody’s waiting for someone that’s high-ranking who’s not a complete moral coward to come out and say so.”

One more unsavory issue raised by this policy is that of the danger we are placing our women into—and not just on the battlefield.

The fact is, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—fought against insurgents in streets and alleyways, where an improvised explosive device can instantly turn a supply line into a front line—have thrust America’s military women into more combat action than ever. Though the rules technically don’t allow women to serve in combat, the reality is they are there.

Feminist leaders are thrilled. But their eagerness to plunge women into the nightmare of warfare is, in fact, disregard for women masquerading as support for women. Some female soldiers recognize this and are not impressed. As one of them said, “Those feminists back home who say we have a right to fight are not out here sitting in the heat, carrying an m16 and a gas mask, spending 16 hours on the road every day and sleeping in fear you’re gonna get gassed.”

The number of women accepting more-combat-related jobs is just a fraction of the number of such jobs that have been made available to them. They don’t want those jobs. Army surveys show that 85 to 90 percent of enlisted women strongly oppose policies aimed at thrusting women into combat.

Women face greater danger than men in most combat situations. Physical limitations make them likelier to be injured, captured or killed. And when women are captured, experience has shown that they are treated far worse—unimaginably worse—than male prisoners of war.

Though feminists lobby hard against rape generally, they “bravely” insist that, since women are duty-bound to serve as combat soldiers, rape in war cannot be stopped.

Shame on those decision-makers who would purposefully subject women to such abuse—only to serve their own twisted ideology!

Consider soberly: The military agency that trains pilots in survival, evasion, resistance and escape as prisoners of war actually includes a component to desensitize male soldiers to the screams of their women cohorts.

Of course, these same men are then expected to treat women soldiers with utmost respect and dignity, in keeping with all the sensitivity training they have had forced upon them.

In the “brutish,” non-politically correct world of yesteryear, the strong were obligated to serve the weak. A traditional-thinking male seeks to protect a woman. An honorable man shields a female from danger and hurt. This attitude, to the feminist, is contemptible. And in a gender-integrated theater of combat, it introduces a host of complications. A leader is expected to view that woman not as a woman, but simply as a soldier—a grunt whom he must be able to send into harm’s way. In the up-is-down moral climate of today’s military, his reluctance to pitch her into the lion’s den is considered backward.

Unsurprisingly, this potent mixture of influences—placing men and women in intimate quarters in a stressful and often very physical environment with this kind of training—creates some explosive results. The New York Times, reporting on the problems associated with women having a higher profile on the front lines, wrote, “They face sexual discrimination and rape, and counselors and rape kits are now common in war zones” (emphasis mine).

Here is where the aclu comes down on this issue. Acknowledging that some women will get pregnant from an assault, its primary concern is that a policy of punishing pregnant soldiers would compromise the anonymity of sexual assault victims. “Of course, Major General Cucolo has stated he won’t punish anyone who becomes pregnant as a result of an assault, but under his policy pregnant assault victims will have to publicly come forward in order to avoid punishment,” it wrote.

That is the kind of tortured logic you end up with once you refuse to acknowledge the far more serious flaws in the fundamental premise that women belong on the battlefield. As Sally Quinn wrote in the Washington Post, “If we can’t win a war without our mothers, what kind of a sorry fighting force are we? Even the evil Saddam Hussein doesn’t send his mothers to fight his war” (Feb. 10, 1991). Some see women warriors as a sign of progressiveness. In truth, it is a sign of barbarity.

The military is the most respected institution in America. It possesses some of the finest, most dedicated and self-sacrificing individuals the nation has produced. But woe be unto us if we fail to recognize how its effectiveness is being undermined by a failure to beat back and restrain the virulent and invasive forces of feminization that enfeeble our modern society.