Naval engineer Ni’Yeria Barr failed her weigh in in 2019.
At first she blamed her eating habits.
But then she noticed staircases tired her out. She’d buy foods and discover she couldn’t tolerate them. Eventually she took a pregnancy test. It was positive.
“I was like, ‘No it can't be! It's not right,’” she said.
Barr’s pregnancy made her unable to serve as an engineer, she lost friends and she even lost her housing, living with a friend and then a supervising officer. Eventually she left active duty.
“I fight for this country. I do things for this country. And just to say… your body doesn't matter, I don't matter… at the end of the day is so ridiculous,” she said.
Before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned abortion rights, military women faced a unique challenge: Their employer subtly discouraged having children, but if they did get pregnant, their employer also restricted access to abortion.
Lory Manning, a director at the Service Women’s Action Network and a retired Navy captain, says women in the military lived with abortion restrictions since Congress introduced the Hyde Amendment in the 1970s.
It stops federal funds from paying for most abortions. That means military women, and pregnant dependents, must take leave time, find private abortion providers, and pay out of pocket.
“We've been living kind of in a post Roe world for a while,” Manning said.
At the same time, according to Heidi Dragneff, who served as a Navy corpsman, military clinics pushed recruits to get on birth control.
“There is a saying that some of the nurses used to tell some of the new recruits,” she said. “‘A baby wasn't issued in your seabag.’"
Dragneff said a pregnancy can become inconvenient in the military, which stigmatizes even non-pregnant women.
“They really treated women on the ship as less than because we could become pregnant at any time,” she said. “And it's like, well, we didn't choose the uterus. The uterus chose us, you know?”
Dragneff and her husband were both in the Navy, but left when she after became pregnant with her second daughter.
“My oldest was a year, year and a half old,” she said. “And so having a toddler and a newborn, I knew… it was going to be too much for me.”
Part of the challenge, she said, is that as the military moves service members from place to place, a pregnant woman could find herself in a state far from people she knows who could support her and a new child.
Those states could also have their own laws in place limiting abortion access
According to Defense Department data, the option to get abortions outside the military health care system shrunk dramatically in the weeks after the Supreme Court reversed Roe.
Laws banning abortion are in effect or coming into effect in 13 states which are home to more than 240,000 service members.
Gil Cisneros, the Pentagon’s chief of personnel and readiness, said changes in abortion laws might worsen an already severe recruitment crisis.
Virginia does not prohibit abortion, but Governor Glenn Youngkin backs a proposal to ban it after 15 weeks.
In June federal lawmakers proposed legislation to remove restrictions on abortion from military medical facilities.
Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine and Rep. Elaine Luria, who represents Virginia Beach and parts of Norfolk, both sit on armed services committees and support abortion rights.
Neither have committed to supporting the bill.