You might have seen the trending Coffee or Die piece by Maggie Ben-Zvi, wherein she relates the painful experience Melissa Hemphill and her husband endured, when they were cadets at the Air Force Academy, just to simply be parents to their child. The truth is that many more cadets face this every year than one might think … and yet, the good news is that something is being done about it.

As of this writing, if you are a female cadet at any of our service academies and you become pregnant, you have three choices:

1) Disenroll from the academy and potentially incur a financial or service obligation, depending on when you disenroll, 2) Abort your pregnancy, or 3) Sign away parental rights to another guardian and then spend thousands of dollars later to adopt your own child back.

As a graduate of the Air Force Academy, I know of several women impacted by this, including some who felt forced to abort their pregnancies. They are still dealing with the emotional scarring that experience imposed on them. Still others pursued the third option of signing away guardianship and then struggling through the thousands of dollars of debt incurred from the ridiculous (and needlessly administrative) process of adopting your own child back. Some argue that this practice is in place because these cadets are being trained to become military officers and cannot afford to be distracted by parenting (any employed parent in the world will tell you this is hogwash and that chewing gum and walking at the same time is eminently possible). The truth is that other cadets (i.e., in ROTC programs around the country) are also being trained to become military officers, and yet they do not have this ridiculous circus hoop to jump through. Why?

There is no good answer to that simple question, which is why National Parents Organization is joining the Air Force Women’s Initiatives Team and other advocates (like the Service Women’s Action Network) to support the Candidates Afforded Dignity, Equality and Training (CADET) Act.

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