Author Jude Eden in her news article, “Marine veteran: there is no military need to draft women,” with USA Today, argues against the view that women should be drafted into the military as well as men. She uses specific evidence concerning women’s injury rates. Published on March 18, 2019, Eden’s article provides her take on the issue with drafting women into the army, one that doesn’t take equality into account, but instead evaluates the efficiency.
To convey her point that it would be useless to draft women, Eden uses logos, a powerful rhetorical appeal. Her appeal to logos first comes into play when she states, “having equal rights doesn’t mean we are required to do the same things in the nation’s defense. If it did, only those who could fight would have rights.” Of course this logic doesn’t necessarily argue against the female draft, but it makes a point about the necessity of said draft: it has none. Her logical argument also comes into play a tad later when she begins to include the facts to supplement the reasoning. “Women have far higher injury rates and risks than men,” she cites, “In warfare it means higher turnover, more casualties and lost battles.” She then goes on to connect this evidence to how many more losses there would be for the United States military if around half of the drafted military were female.
I do not agree with Jude Eden’s point in the least. While I have tried to give it much thought, I don’t believe that women’s injury rates would affect the mortality rates as much as she argues they will. The data that Eden made her conjectures from seems to be skewed. All of the scientific data from experiments concerning injury rates include a much higher number of men than women. While this may be accurate to the numbers of people who were injured, two injured out of five women is going to yield a much higher percentage than two injured out of fifty men, yet the amount of people injured in each group was the same. In addition to this point of faulty results comes a small technicality. There are many single dads in America now that feminism is taking its hold, so if a single dad were drafted to go to war in the next world war, so to speak, who would take care of his child(ren)? My suggestion is to completely reconsider the entire draft. If there is only one adult in a household with one or more children, registration should be optional and if there are more adults than one in a household with one or more children, registration is optional for one of the adults. Obviously the injury rate, however skewed, is still present (but probably not as great as Eden makes it out to be) so men and women might be put into two separate hats and, depending on the lethality of the enemy, different amounts of men and women may be drawn. Of course my suggestion may also have some flaws, but the land of the free is only free if there are many diversities of people in it who are free. In conclusion, I strongly oppose Jude Eden’s assertion, but respect her opinion nonetheless.
California Creative Writer 