ABSTRACT
In September 2012 the British media was agog at the news that a female soldier serving in Afghanistan was rushed into emergency care, where she gave birth to a baby five weeks prematurely. Much was made of the fact that the medical team was not equipped to handle obstetrics, which meant that qualified pediatric staff had to travel from the UK with an incubator. The woman, Lance Bombardier Lynette Pearce, was described as “unknowingly” pregnant, having conceived shortly before deployment to Helmand (Hough and Pearlman 2012). Along with the routine medical explanations as to how pregnancy can be undetected for so long, commentary also dwelt on the question of whether women should have a routine urine test before serving on the front line. It soon emerged that up to two hundred British female soldiers had been ‘aero medically evacuated’ from war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq because of pregnancy over the previous five years (Hough and Farmer 2012; Leake 2010). The coverage was in stark contrast to a feature that ran just a few weeks earlier that highlighted the use of female soldiers in Afghanistan as a ‘secret weapon’ (Baskerville 2012).
