The Draft Is Coming For Your Daughters

A few days ago on X (formerly Twitter), news of women being required to register for the selective service (and therefore the draft) went viral, with over 6.5 million views on @RealPatrickWebb’s post.

The screenshot, unfortunately, doesn’t appear to be made-up or clickbait: You can view the entirety of the document in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of Fiscal Year 2025, which is accessible through the United State Senate Committee on Armed Services’ website.

Men and women are equal in value and dignity, but certainly not in physical stature or ability. While thankfully we have guns that serve to equalize the sexes and provide women the chance to defend themselves against a man who is potentially twice her size, war is made up of unspeakable and horrible things. Soldiers get captured and have their firearms stripped away from them. What happens to an 18 to 26-year-old young woman then? What happens to your sister, your friend, your girlfriend, or your wife? Your daughter?

Are We Going to War? What’s Going On?

Not exactly. Or, at least, not yet. We’ll first discuss the full context of where this change to the draft is coming from.

The NDAA is a legislative act that authorizes the budget for military activities and policy every fiscal year. It first emerged amidst the Cold War in 1961. Long before that, defense funding and policy-making were handled through various separate bills. With the creation of the Department of Defense through The National Security Act of 1947, our military and intelligence were restructured. Just over 10 years later, the Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1958 would eventually give way to the NDAA.

The NDAA relies on drafts from two committees: the United States Senate Committee on Armed Services (SCoAS) in the Senate and the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) in the House of Representatives. The committees are made up of a selection of members in their corresponding chambers. The Senate committee has 25 members, out of the total 100 senators. The House committee has just under 60 members, out of the total 435 elected members of the House of Representatives.

This year, the Senate committee passed its version of the NDAA, which included the following verbiage: Amends the Military Selective Service Act to require the registration of women for the Selective Service.

The Senate committee includes Elizabeth Warren, who, despite her claims to progressivism, is very warm to the idea of war and intervention from the U.S. Chairman Jack Reed has supported Senate leader Chuck Schumer’s call upon Israel to replace their prime minister. Ranking member Roger Wicker has emphasized the need for more spending and reinforcements in our military and defense, as it’s “diminishing to dangerous lows.”

In short, the committee is certainly made up of people who won’t shy away from intervening in other nations’ politics or from war. It could simply be the nation’s fate to always be embroiled or adjacent to some kind of conflict, given our established presence on global military bases and our past interference in numerous conflicts. The morality of whether that’s right or wrong is at the bottom of a bottomless pit. The fact of the matter is that it’s outrageous to prioritize global conflicts when our own nation isn’t even remotely prospering.

And on top of all of that, they want to be able to call upon young women – presumably aged 18 to 26, as the Senate’s NDAA doesn’t specify – to act as cannon fodder.

Not All Women Can Be Warriors

Imagine two warring groups, thousands of years ago, with no significant technological advancements. One group sends an army of male and female combatants. The other sends only males.

There are no firearms, there’s no tool that can truly level the playing field. One man can take on another man. Maybe if he’s an extraordinary warrior, he can take on a few more. But a female, no matter if she’s the most talented and the strongest of all the females, cannot take on a man in the same way. As someone who spent much of her adolescence lamenting that, it’s simply true and a reality of life that sometimes seems cruel. Again, although men and women are not the same in their capacities and abilities, it doesn’t change the fact that they’re both equal in value and dignity.

During war, soldiers have their physical, mental, and spiritual resolve tested to the furthest limits. There are times when they are sexually abused, including the men. In no way is that something to be diminished or dismissed. But the men face no risk of becoming pregnant with the child of an enemy. Countries like Iran reserve an extreme hatred for their own women, even those who try to live by their rules. What on Earth would they do to women soldiers whose entire existence goes completely against their beliefs and standards of morality?

The women who voluntarily sign up for combat roles are exceptional and worthy of admiration. But not every woman, nowhere near the majority, would thrive in a combat role.

Women are simply not made to train like men. Even if we disregard the fact that a physically strong, well-trained woman doesn’t stand a chance physically against a male counterpart who’s had the same conditioning, getting to such a point of physical fitness wreaks havoc on the female body. 

Most fitness programs, even outside the military, are tailored to men and not to women, which is why a woman can do intermittent fasting, heavy weightlifting, and other intense exercise and still not lose weight, unlike a man following the exact same regimen. For women to be optimally healthy, they need to work with their body, and specifically the unique fluctuations of their hormones. If their hormones are so imbalanced that it causes severe pain and discomfort around their periods or eliminates them altogether, that’s a crisis of its own. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends that the female cycle be viewed as the fifth vital sign. Imagine the importance of that being acknowledged in the military.

Assuming that a female soldier makes it through war alive, if she’s to have children immediately after, there’s too high a chance she won’t be able to. The training alone can tremendously damage her endocrine system, and the constant flooding of cortisol certainly will. There still remains a chance, though, so those in power wanting to send her to war would see her risk pregnancy by rape and extreme difficulty actually getting pregnant by a man she chooses.

“This Is What You Asked For!”

There’s no shortage of X users jeering and making jokes about how this is all just part of the equality that women wanted. In the words of user @Cluffalo, “You never disliked feminism, you just want it hurting women instead of men.” 

Such users, if they’re actually men as they claim to be, seem to overlap significantly with those online who are proponents of gender roles that resemble our recollection of 1950s Americana: men work, provide and get the role of “leader,” and women are “submissive.” They claim to hate feminism, as it subverts this ideal, but they’re happy to see this particular consequence of feminism.

These people can be lumped in together with the porn-addled addicts who love feminism because it convinces women and girls that giving your body away or selling it for the price of a Starbucks latte is empowering.

Be Wary, Worry Not – Yet

The Senate Committee’s NDAA highlights the impending threats from China in the Indo-Pacific, Iran in the Middle East, and North Korea with their growing nuclear capabilities. In light of this, they’re including requiring women to register for the draft. They’ve no problem asking young women to throw themselves into the line of fire, risking their safety due to biological disadvantages and exposing themselves to a special kind of violence that men can subject them to.

It smells like the Senate committee thinks war will break out soon, and drafting the men will not be enough. As Evie writer Alicia Bittle said on X, “Any nation that allows itself to be built on the bodies of dead female soldiers is a nation in decline.” So, where do we go from here?

It’s not actually all hopeless.

The House and Senate Armed Services committees each have to come up with their own version of the NDAA. Once those versions have been approved, the bill goes to the rest of the respective chamber, so all the other representatives or senators can review and vote on it. After each chamber has passed its version, a conference committee is formed from members of the Senate and House committees to reconcile the two chambers’ versions of the bill. A final, combined version of the NDAA is sent back to both chambers for a final vote, and then it’s sent to the president for approval, after which it becomes law. It can be vetoed, but the veto can be overridden by a two-thirds majority in both chambers.

Requiring women to register for the selective service is only being proposed by the Senate’s NDAA. At the time of writing, the House committee has passed their version of the NDAA, which includes a section on “restoring the focus of our military on lethality” and makes a point of requiring merit-based promotions, banning critical race theory, and other policies not mentioned in the Senate’s version of the NDAA. The House’s NDAA makes no mention of requiring women to register for the selective service.

It’s unclear yet whether requiring women to register for the draft will become law. Let it not be something that catches you by surprise, and consider whether or not you want to continue voting for senators who agreed to this 22-3. You can see all the Senate committee members here.

Closing Thoughts

The discussion surrounding the draft brings about another question: How do we really earn our freedom?

Thanks to great men and women, we live in a nation where we’re granted so many liberties: freedom of expression, religion, the right to defend ourselves, and the right to due process, among many others that not everyone in the world gets to have.

But basing your freedom (to vote, to be seen as an equal under the law, or whatever else is being contested by these online fans of feminism) on the risk of being selected for conscription is asinine. None of us were alive when blood was shed for the freedoms established in this nation’s Constitution. We’re alive now to enjoy and preserve those freedoms, but in so many ways, people fail to do so, both men and women. Does going in blind to fight in a war really guarantee the preservation of our freedom, when our own leaders have gone out of their way to subject the military to social justice causes?

Focusing so much on who’s actually worthy is pointless and beginning to creep outside this concern for the draft. You’re not deserving of more freedom, more say in who is to become your representative in government, just because you’re willing to provide your body for war efforts that ultimately make politicians a lot of money.

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