Shroom Man 777 wrote:Broomstick wrote:Shroom Man 777 wrote:
Mmm... yeah, but even with the bag of water, jolting them around won't be too healthy and is just an unnecessary health risk for mommy and baby.
By that argument we shouldn't let pregnant women climb stairs or, heaven forbid,
walk around by themselves.
I'm not as avionically inclined as you, but I kinda thought that maneuvering in a supersonic jet fighter combat craft would be a tad bit more extremely strenuous than doing stuff like ambulating normally.
A typical car crash can impose g-forces significantly higher than those experienced in a "dogfight maneuver". 15-20g's is not that uncommon in car crashes, although those forces tend to be very briefly imposed. Nonetheless, most pregnant women who are in car crashes do not miscarry. Some do, it certainly is a risk, but the point is that high g forces
alone do not automatically terminate a pregnancy, even an advanced one. The human body does have considerable capacity to deal with such forces. We don't really understand how and why miscarriage is triggered in women, and given the ethical pitfalls of studying it I doubt we will ever completely understand it.
Although high g's
probably increase the risk of miscarriage so do a lot of other things pregnant women are exposed to on a daily basis. "Raises the risk of miscarriage" isn't sufficient reason by itself to restrict a women's activities unless, of course, you restrict ALL pregnant women from ALL activities that would increase risk - which is a surprisingly large amount of activities.
As a general rule, most activities the woman was doing prior to getting pregnant she can continue to do while pregnant. Jogging, for example, is not forbidden although starting to jog is not encouraged. Towards the end of a pregnancy, though, most women will find such exercise uncomfortable at best.
I just don't see these activities being particularly risky early in pregnancy. Towards the end... that's when it gets problematic.
Hmmm... I guess it depends on just how strenuous flying jet fighters is. I just seriously can't imagine pregnant women going all
Top Gun.
G-loads are pretty strenuous, but someone who flies in that manner as a
career is going to have a body conditioned to such stress, just as a woman who is accustomed to lifting children 40 and 50 lbs will continue to do so while pregnant, or a woman accustomed to lots of exercise may continue it during pregnancy, and so forth. We're not talking about taking a woman off the street and throwing her into a 7g turn, we're talking about women who have become accustomed to this, including the usual adaptive changes
any human body undergoes when becoming accustomed to such things. In other words, the "average woman" is not equal to "highly trained fighterjock woman" in this regard.
How often are fighter pilots expected to deal with these high g-loads? I mean, if they're flying combat craft, then just "normal" airplane-flying isn't just the only thing they're doing. They'll be expected to do combat maneuvers and stuff, evade missile fire and dogfight, and won't that stuff entail more g-loads than normal leisurely flights?
Yes, of course such flying requires higher g-loads. Pilots flying fighter craft
must do such flying on a regular basis both to accustom their bodies to it and to
maintain that adaptation. Multiple times per week at a minimum.
Keep in mind, too, that there is now evidence that
women tolerate high g loads better than men do. Even correcting for size differences (shorter people also tend to tolerate high g's better) this is an area where women have a biological advantage over men, even if it is a small one. That is one of the reasons the US allowed women to start flying combat, they are actually less likely than their male counterparts to experience adverse effects during high g maneuvers. There is a
hypothesis that this is connected to their body having to deal with changing blood volume during pregnancy giving them greater capacity in this regard as a completely coincidental side-effect of evolutionary pressures on human reproduction. In other words, the exact same g-load imposed on the average women will be less biologically stressful than when it is imposed on the average man. So the high-g concern, while having some validity, may not be quite the obstacle it is perceived to be.
Not-so-obviously would be the other internal bits of pregnant women, and their babies, and how they withstand to air combat stresses. Obviously, a very pregnant woman can't do air combat. But how about for not-so-pregnant women, how well can they fare?
I'm
positive there have been some pregnant women subjected to high-g flight very early in pregnancy because a woman typically
doesn't know she's pregnant for some weeks after conception. It's not like a woman conceives then turns purple with green stripes or there's some other blatant signal. A woman might be 2-3 months along before she realizes she's pregnant, so during most of the first trimester she's likely to be flying along as always, unaware she has an additional "passenger". Given that women have been flying for a century now, including as air show pilots (which perform maneuvers identical to combat aircraft) and now as combat pilots it's pretty certain there's been more than one woman pilot pulling high g's. I don't anyone has kept records or studied that matter because so many
men get hysterical about "OH SHE'S PREGNANT PROTECT PROTECT RESTRICT OH HELPLESS BABY MAKER!"
The question should be whether or not there are
objective reasons to bar pregnant pilots from the cockpit. The FAA's stance is that as long as there are no medical complications and she is able to manipulate the controls adequately there is no reason to bar her from the cockpit. As a
practical matter few women pilots continue to fly past the 7th month though I've heard of them doing so up to nearly 9 months (including one story of a GA pilot who had her water break while flying - but that was not first hand and I have no confirmation of it whatsoever).
The woman who owns the flight school where I learned how to fly tailwheels has been teaching aerobatics ("dogfight maneuvers") for nearly two decades now. She mentioned once that she continued giving lessons during the first trimester of all three of her pregnancies and stopped doing so only because she
didn't know what the possible effects would be, not because she felt there was a problem or there was any medical indication of a problem. So... that was 2-3 hours of such flying 3-5 days a week during the first third of all her pregnancies, all of which resulted in healthy children.
I've known enough women pilots who flew
early in their pregnancies for me to believe (although I can't definitely prove it) that it's not an issue early in the pregnancy. All of them I talked to stopped either out of a lot of caution (usually pilots engaging in more risky modes of flight - and combat flying is
certainly in that category) or because of difficulties getting in and out of the airplane, not enough room in the cockpit, and so forth.
Remember that
any pilot will tend to be healthier on average than the general population, and the higher up the ladder you go the more that is true. A woman fighterjock is going to be
very healthy simply in order to pass the physical requirements of the job. That already puts her into a low-risk category for pregnancy.
Now, the
military (any military) is going to have concerns and needs beyond that of civilian flight operations. For these reasons, pregnant military personal are put on leave past a certain point in their pregnancy because a late-pregnancy human woman is not combat-ready. There is too much impact on her ability to get around, maneuver, her stamina.... It is done for solid reasons based in biology whether that is perceived as "fair" or not. For equally valid biological reasons you don't see women in infantry either. But it should be based on
reality, not perceptions of pregnant women as suddenly incredibly fragile soap bubbles or out dated and incorrect notions about pregnancy and risk.
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