Flat Tires and the Feres Doctrine
Posted by Emily in 
Kansas State House Representative Pete DeGraaf knows exactly how it feels to become pregnant as a result of rape. How? He has a spare tire in his car.
A Kansas bill would ban abortion coverage by insurance companies except cases in which the life of the mother is at stake. For everyone else, the option for coverage would be to buy separate, private, abortion-specific plans. Aside from the fact that many women who find themselves in a position to seek abortions often can’t afford health care at all, much less an extra “abortion plan,” the assertion that women should “plan ahead” to become pregnant as a result of rape normalizes rape and unintended pregnancy, suggesting it is an inevitable and predictable fact of life for women in the United States.
According to the McPherson Sentinel, Rep. DeGraaf compared planning ahead for a rape pregnancy to keeping a spare tire around in case of a flat when challenged on his suggestion that in the absence of public funding for abortion in the case of rape, women should purchase abortion policies that would provide coverage for such an event:
Rep. Barbara Bollier, a Mission Hills Republican who supports abortion rights, questioned whether women would buy abortion-only policies long before they have crisis or unwanted pregnancies or are rape victims.
During the House’s debate, Rep. Pete DeGraaf, a Mulvane Republican who supports the bill, told her: “We do need to plan ahead, don’t we, in life?”
Bollier asked him, “And so women need to plan ahead for issues that they have no control over with a pregnancy?”
DeGraaf drew groans of protest from some House members when he responded, “I have a spare tire on my car.”
“I also have life insurance,” he added. “I have a lot of things that I plan ahead for.”
So pregnancy as a result of rape is now as inevitable as death and as mundane as a flat tire? Just like victim blaming, which saddles survivors of sexual assault with the responsibility for their own brutalization, assuming that unintended pregnancy as a result of rape is part and parcel with life as a woman leaves little room for recourse or support. Furthermore, as Maya Dusenbery so articulately stated in her piece on the flat tire fiasco over at Feministing.com,
Taking away … coverage and then urging women to “plan ahead” by buying a separate abortion rider amounts to imposing a financial penalty for the crime of being able to get pregnant.
It seems that DeGraaf’s attitudes towards rape and resulting unintended pregnancy also pervade military culture. Along with bodily injury and death, among other things, sexual assault is apparently so incidental to military service that the Feres Doctrine, a case-law ruling protecting the military from tort claims, bars servicemembers from collecting damages for it. According to Jonathan Turley’s “The Feres Doctrine: Giving our Service Members the Freedom to Sue”:
This is not what Congress intended. In 1946, when Congress enacted the Federal Tort Claims Act, it expressly exempted only combat-related military lawsuits. The Supreme Court, however, ignored this language in deciding the Feres case in 1950 and barred lawsuits with no connection to combat areas.
Even intentional acts of brutality have been protected as matters of military discretion. In one case, a service member was subject to “hazing” by being sexually assaulted with a traffic cone while being photographed in public. Despite what the court called the “despicable” nature of this attack and a pattern of such attacks at the base where the incident occurred, the court found it “service-connected” and therefore barred the claim under Feres.”
Another case, Gonzalez V. U.S. Air Force (03-6047), saw a servicewoman’s sexual assault complaint thrown out as “service-connected” due to Feres. Sexual assault and rape survivors have also reported being advised against taking any action at all with lawyers and advisers citing Feres as an inevitable block to having the case heard, much less won.
This wouldn’t be quite so despicable if the military responded to rape and resulting unintended pregnancies in an appropriate way, but rape is routinely ignored and victims further traumatized, and abortion on military bases, while available for rape, incest or life of the mother, must be paid for with private funds up front for the first two cases. Hearing the story of an active duty Marine attempting to self abort with her cleaning rod in Fallujah after becoming pregnant as a result of date rape and not wanting to report it to her chain of command, the stories of rape reports falling on deaf ears or inciting further harassment included in the complaint of Cioca et al. V. Rumsfeld et al., or Representative Bruce Braley of Iowa taking to the House floor in the HR 3 debate to expose the fact that the “No Tax-Payer Funding for Abortion Act” would make abortion for anything other than to save the life of the mother illegal on military bases makes the Feres precedent that sexual assault and unintended pregnancy are “service-connected” injuries all the more offensive.
Women should never have to plan for unintended pregnancy due to rape just by nature of being a woman, as DeGraaf would have it, or, as is currently the case under the Feres Doctrine, by serving in the military. Accepting pregnancy due to rape as a fact of life in need of an insurance policy or as an incident of military service protected from tort claims puts all responsibility on the victim and sends a message that rape itself is nothing more than an inevitable inconvenience, just like a flat tire.
Kansas Back Bill Restricting Abortion Coverage – The McPherson Sentinel
Kansas State Rep Compares Getting Pregnant from Rape to Getting a Flat Tire – Feministing.com
The Feres Doctrine: Giving our Service Members the Freedom to Sue – jonathanturley.org
Military Abortion: Female Soldiers not Protected by the Constitution they Defend – religiousdispatches.org
Cioca V. Rumsfeld
Rep. Braley Speaks Out Against H.R. 3 – youtube.com
