Thank you.
The current approach to military health care and transition is much more person-centred and trauma-informed than when I, as a medical officer, was released in 2009. Despite the significant improvements made over the last decade, there is always room for more improvements, especially for ensuring the health and well-being of military women.
Ideally, women’s health issues will become normalized, expected and fully integrated parts of the future military medical system. We should all be able to talk about and care for menstrual bleeding suppression, perinatal mental health, urinary incontinence and menopause with as much ease as we talk about a sprained ankle. Thanks to the ongoing political will and targeted funding from budget 2022, a military women’s health strategy is now under way. However, one area in particular, military women’s reproductive health, will require a multidepartment collaborative approach.
Many military and veteran women are challenged to get pregnant, stay pregnant, stay healthy during and after their pregnancies and have healthy offspring. I have followed the medical journeys of hundreds if not thousands of military and veteran women. In my opinion, reproductive loss and its complications are often more soul-crushing and life-altering for women than any other form of trauma the military has to offer them. Although reproductive challenges are possible for anyone at any time, the question that tortures those so impacted is the unknown around what role the military workplace played, if any, in their individual cases.
Most military reproductive hazard research is still only available on men, yet men make new sperm every 90 days. Women reproduce with the eggs they were born with. The potential reproductive health impacts from military-specific workplace exposure to chemicals, extreme temperatures, pressures, vibrations, sound, radiation and traumas are simply not the same for men and women. It is critical that the risks and effects of non-traditional workplace exposures are better understood for women.
Military women usually love their work and are happy to continue working for as long as they can while pregnant. However, when there are complications, it is often only then, in retrospect, that these same women and their health care providers start to research deeper and understand just how little is actually known in this area. The outcome for many of the impacted military women is a living purgatory of self-blaming guilt around what-ifs. Society at large aggravates this topic, as reproductive loss and its complications are still largely viewed as a taboo topic to discuss in public settings. The internalized, rarely vocalized emotions often manifest into health-related conditions that can accelerate some of these women’s release from the military.
Women sign up to the military prepared to give their lives if so required. What military women are not prepared for is to lose their individual potential to create a healthy life because their employer has not yet seen fit to conduct the needed research for women’s full and meaningful inclusion into federal workspaces.
The Minister of National Defence’s mandate letter already directs her to ensure that resources are available for military women’s health. However, the type of foundational occupational research required here cannot be done by the CAF alone, nor should it. Workplace reproductive hazards are not unique to military women. Women in many of the operational new roles in the federal government, including the RCMP, Coast Guard, Corrections Canada, Canada Border Services Agency, Transport Canada and even the Canadian Space Agency all need more knowledge on how to better enable and support women in non-traditional workspaces.
I challenge the committee members to think “big picture”. The Minister of National Defence could, on behalf of military women, help develop a strategic plan for the occupational health needs of all federally employed women. Together, Canada could become the world leader in enabling and supporting the health and well-being of women wishing to work in non-traditional workplaces throughout their life cycle.
If not Canada, who? If not now, when?
Thank you.