Mother Rat

...Nor, if one considers the long-term import, can bringing a child into the world be considered a "temporary" disability...

...I'm sure if a VMI student breaks his leg, he's not required to leave the school," says Willis...

...Already the American Civil Liberties Union has sent VMI a letter advising them against the policy...

...In her book Breaking Out: VMI and the Coming of Women, Laura Brodie, who served on one of the assimilation committees, described that decision as evidence of how far the school "could go to acknowledge the practical realities of women's lives without altering the essentials of VMI...

...At South Carolina's storied military college The Citadel—which was also litigated into co-education in the 1990s— pregnancy is deemed a "temporary disability," and a cadet may elect to remain enrolled, provided she does not miss more than three weeks of school per semester...

...The legal issue, though, will be whether VMI is obliged to pretend otherwise...

...No one could argue that a male cadet who impregnates a girl on a weekend off, possibly unaware of it himself, will have as hard a time escaping detection as a woman in her third trimester...

...But according to Kent Willis, executive director of the Virginia ACLU, the group will file suit against the school only if the federal courts, which are still monitoring the school, or the Justice Department, which filed the original discrimination case, fail to do so...

...Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 forbids recipients of federal funds from excluding "any student from its education program or activity . . . on the basis of such student's pregnancy...

...BY ERIN SHELEY WHEN THE FIRST female cadets signed their names in the matriculation roster of the Virginia Military institute in 1997, proponents of women's rights trumpeted the event as a great victory for equality...

...of a child...

...lation committees, had been the ultimate hypothetical: What happens if a cadet gets pregnant...

...Citadel spokeswoman Charlene Gunnels cites Title IX as the reason the South Carolina school did not consider a policy of dismissal for pregnancies when amending its own code for co-education...

...The school may never know about men who impregnate women...

...The dismissal policy was actually proposed when VMI was first planning for co-education but was scrapped in favor of a voluntary leave of absence for pregnant cadets...

...VMI's new policy keeps the school from tacitly encouraging the evasion of parental responsibility—at the risk, unfortunately, of encouraging abortion—but it also runs into a legal snag...

...In other words, even if a cadet does give birth, she must give up the custody of her child to remain in school...

...Likewise, the federal service academies, which went co-ed in the late 1970s, allow for up to one year of leave...

...But given that VMI features one of the most rigorous physical training regimens in the country and communal living quarters with next to no privacy, it is clear that the school's "essentials" and the "realities" of pregnancy are anything but compatible...

...But the difficulties of coeducation are just beginning for the school they've left behind...

...Satisfied with this conclusion to the years-long legal battle that forced the venerable all-male military college to admit women to its famed "ratline," the lawyers and the media packed up and left Lexington, Virginia...

...In moving to expel cadets who become parents, VMI understands itself to be buttressing one of the most important principles it teaches cadets: responsibility...

...Occasioned by the recent case of a VMI junior who elected to remain in the barracks until the seventh month of her pregnancy, the policy answers a question that, for the school's assimiErin Sheley, an intern at The Weekly Standard, is a senior at Harvard University and serves on the editorial board of the Harvard Political Review...

...The day-to-day dilemmas of the co-ed VMI are perhaps nowhere more obvious than in a new code the school plans to implement in the fall: All cadets who mother—or father—a child will be required to leave the school...

...No military school has ever allowed its cadets to raise children while enrolled...

...Of course it will...

...The language of the code will not be finalized until September, delaying legal threats for the moment...

...The conflict resurrects the old question that surrounded the original VMI debate: What to do when the egalitarian impulse collides with the irreducible differences between the sexes...

...The new VMI policy is unique among military schools...

...Quite simply, pregnancy is not the same thing as breaking a leg...

...Consequently, cadets, male or female, are not permitted to be married, nor are they permitted to have custody...

...Whatever the quality of the legal draftsmanship, it seems unlikely that VMI will avoid yet another skirmish in the courts...

...To allow a cadet to remain in school after becoming a parent is thus, to a certain extent, to endorse the shirking of a more fundamental responsibility...

...According to Randy Davis, spokesman for the Virginia attorney general's office, which is assisting VMI in drafting the code, before the cadets "return in the fall, our office will work with them to make sure that the policy is constitutional...

...However, all these institutions seem to agree on one thing: It is not possible to reconcile pregnancy with the realities of a military education...

...The code at The Citadel expresses this well: "Cadet life is stressful, physically demanding, and requires the full-time commitment of all cadets...

...A recipient shall treat pregnancy . . . in the same manner and under the same policies as any other temporary disability...

...But rooting out such "injustices" will carry a high price...

...Will the VMI code discriminate against women...

...If VMI cannot simultaneously preserve both the health of its students and the educational role it was created to fill without violating the law, perhaps it's time to reexamine the definition of equality to which it was forced to conform in the first place...

...We also believe there's an equal protection argument . . . because in reality such a policy would be implemented in a way that discriminates against women...