The military has announced plans to cover costs for sperm and egg freezing for service members, expanding a negligent “reproductive” effort to the detriment of military personnel and their families.
The pilot program, launching Sept. 14 under the Veteran Families Health Services Act of 2025, will run for three years and reimburse costs of sperm freezing up to $500 and egg cryopreservation up to $10,000 for service members who meet deployment or separation requirements.
The program fulfills a longtime Democrat-backed effort to disassociate military women from maternal family roles; increases dissonance in already strained military families, further divorces procreation from spousal stability, and ensures mothers can be separated from their children.
The Sexes Are Not Equal in Combat
Women have supported the armed forces in non-combat roles since the development of the Army Nurse Corps in 1901, with increased but limited access to positions until 2013. At that time, then-President Barack Obama supported a lifting of the ban by former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. By 2016, gender specific roles in the military were effectively eliminated.
The exclusion of women from serving in combat roles has been justified. Combat poses the direct and imminent risk of injury and death, as well as placing soldiers in tactical locations that cannot adequately accommodate gender separation. Forward operating bases and outposts offer little to no separate housing or privacy barriers between the sexes. Experiential hardships can extend well beyond privacy, encompassing lack of food and sleep that disproportionately harm women.
A small-scale study of Army rangers claiming that women are less physiologically affected by rigorous training than men, does not match up with any large-scale studies of women exposed to extreme physical hardship. The study presents an insufficient apples-to-oranges comparison and should not be utilized as an argument to place excessive physical strain on women in the military.
The Biological Clock
Soon after the military opened doors to place women in hazardous duty stations, Democrat-led efforts for IVF-related services began. Building on that effort, in 2018 Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Wash., called IVF the “most effective form of assisted reproductive technology” for service members whose fertility was affected by their service. Rather than improving health and safety for women, the costly, unethical, and dangerous technology was promoted.
Ten years after so-called integration, women who entered combat in their peak fertility years are now aging out of childbearing, or at least edging closer to the end of their fertile years. The possibility of deployment has likely affected the many military women choosing to begin families after age 35, further decreasing their likelihood of conceiving naturally.
As infertility continues to disproportionately plague women in service, IVF serves as an expensive, politically driven distraction.
Hellbound and Down 