This story needs a bit of a history lesson...

and it begins back in the late 1970s.  The military in general and the Air Force in specific was dealing with one of the unexpected issues of converting to the all-volunteer force.  There were more and more families where both adults were military personnel, and more single parents with partial or full custody of their children.  As a result, the issue of who would care for these children in the event of a deployment.  One parent in a couple where both parents are military can't just stay home and take care of the kids.  The needs of the service take priority.  A single parent can't be exempted from deployment to take care of a kid.

The upshot is that all branches of the military required personnel who are single parents, or married to other military personnel, to make appropriate dependent care arrangements.  I remember my commander nearly shitting a brick when one single parent said her dependent care arrangment was to put her two year old daughter on a plane home to her own mother in event of a deployment.  In fact she'd bought an open one-way ticket to "document" her arrangement.  He counseled her and she eventually found someone local to take care of the kid until the mother could arrive and take over.

Now we get to the case in the news today.  Rebecca Edmonds was a military "brat" growing up in a family where Dad served in the Navy and the family was constantly relocating due to transfers.  She decided to pursue her own military career and went to college to become a nurse on a ROTC scholarship.  She took the oath of office as an officer and in fact was sworn in by her father. 

The problem is that she discovered a few weeks before she took her oath of commissioning that she was pregnant.  The Air Force doesn't permit single parents to enlist or accept a commission as an officer.  That includes women who are pregnant at the time of enlistment or commissioning.  People who become single parents after joining the service are a different mater entirely.

So she was removed from the service.  The Air Force has called what she did "fraud" and demanded repayment of nearly $100,000 they paid for her education.  She's paying a little each month from her earnings as a pediatric nurse toward what is owed.  She's also appealing the decision to remove her from the military and caring for her ten month baby.

There are several issues here and before getting to the military one, let's look at one that I'm having trouble wrapping my head around.  Edmonds points out at length that the reason she didn't abort her baby in order to avoid this problem (which I'm not advocating, btw) because she's a practicing Catholic.  Maybe I'm confused but how is it that a practicing Catholic gets into the position of having to consider an abortion.  Is the Catholic religion's proscription against pre-marital sex so much less important than the faith's prohibition against abortion?  Apparently so.  But a sin is a sin, is a sin, right?  Aren't both of these what Catholics refer to as "mortal sins?"

But okay.  She's young, attractive and after all, I remember my late father telling me an old joke.  The difference between Catholic co-eds and Jewish co-eds is that the Catholic girls have the fake jewelry and the real orgasms.  So she felt it was okay to have pre-marital sex.  Fair enough.

Why is it that the Air Force will tolerate people who are already on active duty becoming single parents and as long as they make an adequate dependent care arrangement there is no further penalty?  If an Air Force member gets divorced from his or her civilian spouse and suddenly is a single parent, they don't get kicked out.  If an Air Force member already serving gets pregnant, she isn't shown the door.  Why is this any different?  They spent $100,000 training her.  Get their money's worth, make her a military nurse and let her work out a system where her son will be properly cared for if she's forced to deploy.