British soldier 'ambushed' by pregnancy
Published: 9/21/2012 10:12 AM
Last Modified: 9/20/2012 5:34 PM
A British soldier gave birth this week on the front lines in Afghanistan, where the pregnancy had apparently gone unnoticed for several months.
Both mother and son were reported in good shape and on the way home to the UK after Tuesday’s unexpected delivery at Camp Bastion, where the Taliban had launched a daring raid that destroyed several U.S. fighter jets and killed two Marines just four days earlier.
The soldier passed a physical before deploying six months ago, but the exam didn’t include a pregnancy test, officials said.
“Nobody expected that a woman who was earmarked for operations in Afghanistan would be pregnant,” an official told the BBC.
Well, these things do happen.
Since 2003, the royal armed forces have sent home as many as 200 pregnant Brits from Iraq and Afghanistan, according to published reports.
“Military rules ban pregnant servicewomen from front-line duties,” the BBC explained.
This particular soldier, however, reportedly didn’t realize that she was pregnant. And nobody else suspected it, either.
The troops must be terribly busy over there, and I can understand how certain details might escape attention.
If a soldier gains a few pounds or gets irritable now and then, you might chalk it up to war being hell and all that.
But pregnancy is not just an elephant in the room. It’s an elephant dancing in a tutu and waiving sparklers in the air.
It doesn’t sneak up on people very often.
In fact, labor comes as a total surprise in only 1 out of 2,500 pregnancies, according to a British study cited by the BBC. That’s 0.04 percent.
Even in those rare cases, it’s not clear how many of the women really don’t recognize the physical symptoms and how many are suffering from a mental health problem that puts them in denial.
In the other 99.96 percent of pregnancies, the women can’t stop noticing it.
Read the BBC coverage here.
Written by
Michael Overall
Staff Writer
