Conscription or Conception: The Forbidden Baby Boom
This would be something reminiscent of the carrot and the stick scenario; a way to amend the draft exemptions and consequently incentivize the common good and families.
I want to make it clear that I don't support the draft. Like most of us, I don't want to be drafted. Yet, I find it an interesting experiment to consider the possible benefits of a military draft, if there can be any.
Americans haven't witnessed a draft since the very unpopular Vietnam War, and its consequences are rarely discussed. Amid escalating tensions abroad, I found myself in a hypothetical that I'm sure all men have once considered: “Is there a way to avoid being drafted?”
The answer to that question remains unclear, as many of the rules on draft deferments are provisional and contingent on wartime specifics. I was not satisfied with this uncertainty, and began wondering how American men like myself could avoid conscription, but not through superficial means like educational deferments of the past, when hundreds of thousands pursued unnecessary higher education solely to evade deployment. I am proposing a way to potentially create a benefit out of the difficult and upsetting proposition that a draft creates. We could ignite a draft baby boom.
This would be something reminiscent of the carrot and the stick scenario; a way to amend the draft exemptions and consequently incentivize the common good and families by adding a blanket exemption for married men with children. Natalists love to incentivize positive reasons to get married, but what if there were serious penalties for being single and childless? This type of “stick” rather than “carrot” approach is not a new idea, in fact, the Han Dynasty literally taxed unmarried women for a time, and more recently the communist regime under wacky dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu imposed a special income tax on childless men and women.
Maybe if we are forced to implement a draft, why don’t we try to effect some positive change out of it? Well, here’s the thing: this used to be the standard.
On April 23, 1970, President Richard Nixon officially ended the “paternity deferment” (marriage + children = exemption) via Executive Order 11527, which eliminated automatic III‑A deferments for men who became fathers after that date. For most of modern history, including WWI and WWII, being a married man with children exempted you from the responsibility of mandatory military service. U.S. and Canadian fertility trends were similar from 1940 onward, but diverged sharply from 1965 to 1970. The difference: Canada didn’t have a draft, but we did.
For women aged 20–24, who were most likely to be with draft‑eligible men, birth rates were approximately 17% above the counterfactual — about 25 extra births per 1,000 women. When President Nixon got rid of that exemption, he ended the mini baby boom that had been created by the Vietnam War, and birth rates sharply declined again.
I have to reiterate, I don’t want to be drafted to Iran or anywhere else, but if it happens, maybe we should make the best of it, no? Ok, well, it’s just a thought experiment, and I think the overall point stands — instead of incentivizing marriage, maybe we have to start disincentivizing being single and childless.
It still stands to reason that when faced with the decision to either marry a woman and start a family or go to war in a desert or a jungle halfway across the world, men will choose to start a family, well…at least most of them.
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I had no idea the paternity exemption even existed. It seems so obvious though. Of course we should be more reticent to potentially deprive a child of a father than we are to draft a single man. What sane society wouldn't consider that?
That we stopped exempting dads and started exempting college students at roughly the same time speaks volumes about our current liberal regime's priorities.
Just a minor quibble: the Vietnam War certainly became very unpopular indeed, but it didn't start out that way. Having been a teenager during the 1960's, and paying attention, I can say from my own observation that it was quite popular, or at least thought of as necessary, here in California from 1962 until about 1967. No one I knew actually wanted to be drafted to fight in it, of course, but most of us considered it part of our obligation to serve our country, if needed. But in 1967, despite the nation's sacrifices, the war seemed to reach a stalemate, and the costs (both human and financial) started becoming alarming. Finally came 1968 and its explosion of Left-wing ideology on campuses and other centers of influence, plus North Vietnam's Tet Offensive, and in the space of a few months, seemingly, public opinion veered toward that unpopularity you allude to.