Republican Sen. Roger Wicker (MI) called out the Department of Defense’s (DOD) missing justification for its abortion travel policy, according to a letter obtained by The Daily Caller.
The Pentagon previously claimed that abortion restrictions would harm military readiness, although there is no data to support the claim.
Following the Dobbs decision, which gave the authority to decide abortion policies to the states, a document from the DOD read, “Several of the states that have severely restricted access to or banned abortion are also home to large military installations. This raises questions about service member access to abortion care, as well as a range of family planning options. There is little existing research on service members’ experiences with family planning.”
The DOD then initiated a study to “better understand service members’ experiences with family planning services provided by both DoD and community providers.”
“The Senate Armed Services Committee discovered your department is seeking public comment on proposed focus groups and surveys to be conducted with military personnel to ‘highlight areas related to family planning that may threaten the DoD’s ability to field a ready and lethal force,” Wicker wrote in a letter to the DOD. “In other words, over a year after you stated unequivocally that the Dobbs ruling has ‘readiness, recruiting, and retention implications for the Force’ the Department of Defense is still searching for evidence to support this baseless claim.”
“If the Administration were actually committed to maintaining an apolitical military, a study such as this should have been undertaken months before you promulgated this divisive and inflammatory policy,” Wicker added.
“The resulting politicization of our armed forces has been shameful and completely self-inflicted,” Wicker stated in the letter. “It is incumbent upon this administration to retract these unsubstantiated abortion-related readiness claims, suspend this divisive policy, and take an unbiased approach to collect the necessary data to determine whether any force readiness challenges may be correlated to the recent change in law due to Dobbs.”
See my full hallway interview on the Department of Defense's abortion travel regulations briefing here. pic.twitter.com/7Y9M7LfynC
— Senator Roger Wicker (@SenatorWicker) July 19, 2023
