In one minute—so hopefully someone else will allow me to finish this off—if I can, I'm just going to go straight at it.
When I was a brand new physician in Greenwood, Nova Scotia, very early in my career, one of my first calls was to the flight line for a medical emergency, and it was a pregnant woman who had been up flying—because we had said it was fine to fly—and she was miscarrying in flight. When we're in the military, these aren't just patients. These are the people we live with, we breathe with and we go to the grocery store with. It's a very tight connection, and for the rest of my life I will still remember—and this was 30 years ago—her looking up at me and asking, “Karen, did I just kill my child? Am I safe to be doing this kind of military flying on this plane?”
I was new and I looked at her and I still remember I said, “I do not know the answer to this question, but I promise you I will find out.” It is with her permission.... I spoke to her today to say I might talk about this and to ask if it was okay. She said, “Yes, it has to be done.”
It's these kinds of memories.... I'm 30 years from that, and I don't know the answer to these questions yet, and neither do the other women. For 30 years we've been asking, “Can we please find the answers?”
Maybe it's unrelated. Maybe it wasn't related, but we don't know, because we haven't been gathering the data and we haven't been asking the questions. Doing so is a political inconvenience. We are an inconvenient truth, and we need to address these things directly in order to fix them, so that we can have our daughters and our sisters joining the military.
I feel very strongly that we need a military, but we need to do it better.