Hacker News Reader

Comment by sofixa | Hacker News Reader

And the core premise I'm disagreeing is that countries on purpose draft only men, because women are kept to be bred to repopulate the country in case of military disaster.

IF that were the case, governments would do something, anything, to encourage such behaviour (one man getting multiple women pregnant) after the war is over. Nobody is able to come up with any examples of anything like that happening, which again leads me to believe that the premise is bullshit and the real reasons why only men are drafted are somewhere between biology and misogyny.

View on HN

> and the real reasons why only men are drafted are somewhere between biology and misogyny.

Sounds about right. Historically, the military culture is obviously deeply rooted in patriarchy. Men are to defend their countries, in the same way that 'women and children' have been supposed to go first into lifeboats.

There are some arguments to be found in the above mentioned Rostker v. Goldberg, and in the legal debate that followed:

Once the combat issue is put in proper perspective and the evidence of women's recognized ability to perform military functions is assessed, it becomes apparent that an exclusion of women from a draft registration requirement would be the product of the archaic notion that women must remain 'as the center of home and family.'

and

Congress followed the teachings of history that if a nation is to survive, men must provide the first line of defense while women keep the home fires burning.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150502095151/http://digitalcom...

>And the core premise I'm disagreeing is that countries on purpose draft only men, because women are kept to be bred to repopulate the country in case of military disaster.

It's one of the concerns, not necessarily the primary. Somebody had to keep the household going, raise and feed the existing children, and so on (which, at the day, and even today in most parts, was the role of women).

>IF that were the case, governments would do something, anything, to encourage such behaviour (one man getting multiple women pregnant) after the war is over.

That doesn't follow. Governments would only need to "do something, anything" if the thing didn't just happen by itself - which generally, it did.

And of course the morals of the day wouldn't have them explicitly promote anything of the sort.

Fertility rates do not decrease after a war, which means fewer remaining men get the same number of women pregnant.

From a sibling comment, in Russia fertility rates did indeed decrease:

https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article-abstract/99/2/229/58403/...

Because so many civilians died, including women, and harsh living conditions due to wide spread destruction.

The URSS did draft women. Also, massive civilian casualties.

I am not even in Russia, but that war pulled so much out of every region, including mine (which did not see fighting directly, but provided many conscripts and resources), that after the war there simply wasn't much to eat or too many people to work the fields. My grandparents first ate caramel candy in 1952, IIRC. Good luck increasing your fertility rates in these conditions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com