Equal Access, Equal Obligation?

I was cooking the other day when I thought about a lieutenant I haven’t seen in years. I don’t know why. That happens to me sometimes. A memory will just show up. Nothing in particular brings it to mind. I’ll be driving, or walking, or standing in the kitchen cutting onions, and suddenly I’m back in some room I haven’t thought about in years. This one has come back to me a couple of times recently. It was sometime around 2018 or 2019. I was a squadron commander in the Air Force, and one of my flight commanders, a captain and a mother, came to see me about one of her lieutenants. The lieutenant was a woman who had recently had a baby and had been away from normal operational duty for quite a while. I don’t remember the exact amount of time anymore, and I don’t want to pretend that I do. The Air Force had become increasingly generous with maternity and caregiver leave, and by the time this lieutenant was due to return, she had already been away for a significant stretch. Eventually, though, the leave ended. She was expected to come back to duty. In our squadron, duty didn’t mean showing up at an office at eight in the morning and going home at five. It meant going out on a weapons-system alert. Roughly thirty-six hours away from home. The lieutenant told her flight commander that she couldn’t go. She needed more time. She was breastfeeding. More specifically, she said she couldn’t pump enough breast milk ahead of time to leave her baby for the duration of the alert. Her husband was also active duty, but he worked a job that allowed him to be home. He could care for the baby while she was gone. The problem was not that there was no one to take care of the child. The problem was feeding the child. So my flight commander came to me and asked the question commanders eventually get paid to answer: What do we do? Do we send her back on duty? Do we give her more time? How much more? A month? Three months? Until the child turns one? And if nothing changes, then what? Do we simply accept that she cannot perform that portion of the job for as long as she is breastfeeding? I remember the problem because no answer made everybody happy. And I believed the lieutenant. I want to make that clear. I did not think she had invented a breastfeeding problem because she didn’t want to work. I think she had a baby, she was trying to feed that baby, and she was looking at thirty-six hours away from her child and saying, I don’t know how I can do this. That mattered. She had a responsibility for the child. But something else mattered too. Somebody had to go on alert. The mission didn’t disappear because one lieutenant had a difficult family situation. If she didn’t go, somebody else did. Somebody else stayed away from his or her family. Somebody else carried the burden. And suddenly a question that sounds like a personnel problem becomes a philosophical one. If we say everyone can do this job, can we also say some people don’t always have to do all of it? And if we say that, who decides when that is okay? That question is bigger than breastfeeding. But breastfeeding is what makes the question difficult, because biology is not imaginary. Pregnancy is real. Childbirth is real. Recovery is real. Breastfeeding is real. None of those things disappear because an institution adopts a policy of equal opportunity. That is where equality gets complicated. We often use the word equality as though it answers a question. Sometimes it only starts one. There is equality of access. Can you enter the profession? Can you compete for the position? Can you command? Can you serve in the operational role? Can you serve on the combat team? And then there is equality of obligation. Once you have the position, are the expectations the same? That distinction becomes uncomfortable because we like clean moral principles. Treat everyone the same. Accommodate people according to their circumstances. Both sound good until they run into each other. One way of thinking about this is the difference between equality and equity. Equality says people occupying the same role ought to face the same essential obligations. Equity says relevant differences may justify different treatment. The hard part is deciding which differences matter, and how much difference in treatment is still compatible with calling it the same job. Another way of thinking about it is role morality. Certain roles carry obligations that ordinary life does not. A judge cannot decide a case based on friendship. A physician cannot simply abandon a patient in the middle of surgery. A military officer accepts obligations that most citizens do not. That does not mean the officer stops being a mother, father, husband, wife, son, or daughter. It means those obligations sometimes collide. The philosopher W. D. Ross wrote about competing duties. You can have more than one genuine moral obligation at the same time. You can have a duty to your child, a duty to your fellow officers, a duty to the mission, a duty to obey lawful orders, and a duty not to place unreasonable burdens on other people. The fact that one duty is real does not make the others disappear. That is the part that gets lost when we turn difficult problems into slogans. Sometimes two good things really are in conflict. You can even make what you believe is the right decision and still leave something valuable damaged. Maybe you order the lieutenant back onto alert. The squadron is treated fairly, the mission is covered, and a mother believes she has been forced into a situation that makes caring for her infant harder. Something has been lost. Or maybe you excuse her. The mother and baby are protected, but another lieutenant goes in her place. And another time. And another. Something has been lost there too. There is no administrative form that makes the loss disappear. This question also has an interesting history in the American military. For much of the twentieth century, the institutional answer to pregnancy and motherhood was much harsher than it is today. Women could serve, but pregnancy would effectively end that service. One of the important cases in that history involved Air Force Captain Susan Struck, a nurse who became pregnant in 1970 and challenged the policy that would have forced her out of the service. Her case became part of the broader movement away from treating pregnancy as automatically incompatible with military service. That change was important. But it didn’t eliminate the problem. It moved the problem. At first, the institutional answer had essentially been: women can serve, but motherhood may end that service. Then the answer became: women can serve and become mothers. Which immediately creates another question: what happens when the obligations of motherhood and the obligations of military service conflict? That is not an argument against women serving. It is simply the next question. And over time the question became sharper. The military opened more roles to women: aviation, ships, operational specialties, and eventually direct ground combat positions. Each time a barrier came down, the debate centered on equal access. But another question always follows behind it. Does equal access imply equal obligation? Or can equal access coexist with different obligations? And if the answer is yes, how different can those obligations become before we are no longer talking about the same job? This is where historical fights over equality become more complicated than they first appear. A woman like Susan Struck was effectively saying that pregnancy shouldn’t automatically end her military career. I think she was right. But once an institution accepts that principle, it has to turn an individual claim into a general rule. Not because every woman necessarily wants exactly what she wanted. Not because every future mother will make the same decision. Institutions simply cannot operate on individual intent. They need principles. A person fights… Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe