J. Marie Boerema
“I swear that I will support and defend the constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same,” promises every woman who enters the military.
Roe v Wade ruled that the rights inherent in the Constitution included the right to choose whether to continue a pregnancy. And yet, because of a strange legal contradiction, these women were denied access to an abortion while under the healthcare umbrella of the Armed Forces because they swore to defend that same Constitution.
In 1973, Roe v Wade declared a woman has the right to decide whether to continue her pregnancy. Seven years later, the Hyde Amendment guaranteed that there would be no access to federal funds to perform an abortion, except in the case of rape, incest or endangerment of life. Because of this, there was one group of women in particular who swore an oath to support and defend their constitution against all enemies and who did not receive the rights declared to be constitutionally theirs by Roe v Wade.
How did this happen? The Hyde Amendment, passed seven years after Roe v Wade, guaranteed that federal funding could not be used to obtain an abortion unless in case of rape, incest, or immediate endangerment of life. Women in the military are under Tricare, “the health care program for uniformed service members, retirees, and their families around the world.” Active-duty women have no option to disenroll from Tricare. Legally, the military cannot provide resources for obtaining an abortion because it is a federally-funded organization, which means that the Hyde Amendment forbids the allocation of its funds towards abortion resources. As a result, women who wanted an abortion and were actively engaged in the defense of their country had no legal option except to seek an abortion on their own time and out of their own pocket, in contrast to women who had the option to pursue their own health insurance.
This strange divergence from mainstream access to funding for abortion before Roe v Wade was overturned created unique memories of the abortion process within the military for women trying to obtain an abortion at the time.
Allison Gill, who was 21 and serving the Navy when she was drugged and raped, did not immediately file paperwork detailing the rape after it occurred in the 1990s. This resulted in significant difficulty obtaining an abortion when she discovered her pregnancy later, since Tricare required extensive documentation of the rape before she could have access to funding. She ended up simply walking off base one day and going to a Planned Parenthood clinic that happened to be close to her base. She paid for it out of her savings. At the same time Roe v Wade was upholding her right to an abortion, the Hyde Amendment, coupled with the requirement to be enrolled under Tricare, ensured that she would have to obtain a secret (and expensive) abortion by herself.
Similarly, Joanna Sweatt’s abortion process while serving in the Marines was a long search for procedures she was consistently denied. She had two abortions out of pocket while married and serving in the Marines, one due to financial reasons and one because of its life-threatening nature. Her memory of obtaining these abortions while stationed in the continental US is traumatic, but she draws attention to the fact that many deployed women’s only option to get an abortion is to find sympathetic medical personnel off base (sometimes in remote villages or cities with poor infrastructure and facilities) because the military will not provide resources for an abortion. Allison Gill was able to get an abortion because she was stationed in America, not on deployment where it would be almost impossible to find the necessary medical resources. Not every woman in the military who desires an abortion has the same access that other women (civilians and otherwise) do.
These perspectives of what it takes to obtain an abortion are unique to military women and form a particular site of collective memory of the interplay between the Hyde Amendment and Roe v Wade.
To conclude, the legal consequences of these two diametrically opposed ideologies (represented by the Hyde Amendment and Roe v Wade) have a direct impact on how these women perceived and remember their abortions. Many women outside the military remember the era when Roe v Wade signified the right to decide whether to continue a pregnancy as a time of freedom to obtain an abortion. In contrast, servicewomen did not have a similar freedom because of these dueling legalities, and this collective memory of the interplay between the Hyde Amendment and Roe v Wade is unique to their situation and legacy.
Sources:
Padilla, Mariel. “’The Government Owns Your Body’: What Abortion Access Now Looks like for the Military.” The 19th, 22 Mar. 2023, https://19thnews.org/2022/07/abortion-access-military-service-members/.
Salganicoff, Alina and Sobel, Laurie. “The Hyde Amendment and Coverage for Abortion Services.” KFF, 6 Mar. 2021, https://www.kff.org/womens-health-policy/issue-brief/the-hyde-amendment-and-coverage-for-abortion-services/.
Seymour, Jane et al. “Pregnancy and Abortion: Experiences and Attitudes of Deployed U.S. Servicewomen.” Military Medicine, 2020, 1646-1654.
Sweatt, Joanna. “Abortion Allowed My Military Service to Continue. Without Roe, Other Women Might Be Hindered.” NBCNews.com, NBCUniversal News Group, 28 June 2022, https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/abortion-military-service-roe-women-might-not-serve-rcna35755.
The Congressional Research Service, The Hyde Amendment: An Overview , 20 July 2022.
TRICARE, https://www.tricare.mil/.
I found your topic to be super interesting. I had no previous knowledge of the Hyde Amendment or the effect that it had on US soldiers. It was surprising to learn that it was added 7 years after the passing of Roe v. Wade.
Before reading your article, I had never heard of the Hyde Amendment, as I’m sure many others had not. It is sad that the people defending the rights that the country offers are sometimes denied them. I specifically like how you included first hand accounts of women that went through this. It provided a better insight into what these women had to go through and allows it to feel much more personal. While abortion is not ever considered to be a great memory for anyone that has had one, these women in particular will never have the same memory has women outside of the military.
I find it interesting how complicated the Hyde Amendment made it for women to get abortion through federal funding. It did not overturn Roe v. Wade, but it definitely contradicted it in a way. Women could still get legal abortions but this Amendment made it so much tougher for women to do so. I like how you examined the military side of the issue to highlight a group of people who the abortion debate does not normally shed a ton of light on.
This was super interesting! I had never heard about the Hyde Amendment until now. It’s interesting that even though Roe v Wade made abortion legal, the US gov itself didn’t involve itself too much in abortion. The gov. never codified abortion, putting it into law that abortion was legal, they just grouped it into a right of privacy, which is why the ruling was able to be overturned. Even here the Hyde Amendment says federal funding wouldn’t be used for abortion unless in extreme cases.
As a member of the National Guard, this was a very interesting read. I had never thought of the implications of being a woman in the military during this time period. We now spend extensive time on the topics of equal opportunity and SHARP (Sexual Harassment/Assault Response and Prevention) in the military. I think that’s a good first step, but there is still a lot of work to be done.