Take Action: House and Senate Taking Votes on “Woke” Defense Bill

After the November elections, the House and Senate will vote on the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Each chamber has its own version (H.R. 8070/S. 4638), containing provisions that could damage our armed forces.  The two versions must be reconciled, so there is still time to weigh in with your Members of Congress.

In July, the Senate version passed out of committee with two provisions that Eagle Forum opposes. The first terrible provision would require women ages 18-25 to register for the Selective Service. Sadly, a number of Republican Senators support this language, ignoring the fact that women do not have the same muscular and bone structures as men and therefore fewer women would be capable of qualifying for military service. Reports and studies have shown that men outperform women in strength and endurance. Even when they “meet the minimum requirements” for military service, women are injured at twice the rate of men, just as female athletes in high school and college sports suffer much higher rates of injury. Anyone sending young women off to war would be using them as cannon fodder. 

Proponents thought they were dulling the impact of this change by adding a carveout to exempt drafted women from combat roles. This still leaves the problem of sending women who are mothers or seek to become moms off to war to face potential injury and death. The entire policy requiring females to register for the draft needs to be stricken. 

The second objectionable provision is the addition of Senator Tammy Duckworth’s Right to IVF (S. 4445) bill that mandates insurance coverage for individuals seeking to use artificial reproductive technologies (ART). The language includes a definition of ART that goes well beyond IVF to cover cloning and experimenting with animal-human hybrids. The Right to IVF bill failed twice when brought up on its own. We oppose this mandate and any attempt to have taxpayer funds used to pay for unethical methods of junk science. 

The House bill has its own problems. The House version contains a measure that allows military recruits to test positive for marijuana and still join the armed services. The current Biden Administration regulation allows this only on a case-by-case basis so that the House NDAA would codify an even more extreme version of this policy!

Additionally, the House NDAA contains the expansion of IVF coverage to the dependents of military servicemen. The original intention for providing IVF coverage was to help those soldiers who suffered injuries that impacted their fertility. Congress is now trying to expand this coverage to include ‘dependents’ – including children of service members. This is estimated to cost taxpayers $1 billion per year. 

After the Senate bill passes, select members of both chambers will come together in a “conference committee” to work out the differences between the bills. While the conferees have not been chosen yet, we want our House members to know ahead of time that marijuana and IVF coverage expansion must go. We also want our Senators to know that drafting our daughters and covering unethical means of reproduction is a non-starter. None of these policies make our defense strong and powerful.

Call or email your Senators today and tell them to vote against S. 4638, the Senate version of the National Defense Authorization. Also, contact your Representative and encourage them to sound the alarm on the two unnecessary marijuana and IVF expansion provisions in H.R. 8070.