In mixed troops it's going to be hard to keep the female guardsmen from becoming pregnant, besides rules and punishment, some regiments could issue out a monthly injection of birth control. Also every guardsmen would probably have condoms issued. Otherwise you risk losing half your troops due to pregnancy and shit like that. Also you risk having the males worry about the pregnancy rather than task at hand, because they're both in the front. 

One thing to remember is that schola progeniums are filled with "children of the guard." Most commissars and storm troopers are the offspring of guard parents or other Imperial officers that cannot care for their children themselves due to their duty.

TCBC Freak said:

However, if we want to go back to the really old fluff, a 1st Edition article on Whiteshields mentioned the Imperial Guard drafting the children of soldiers into their own ranks as soon as they grow of age. It is of note that the source specifically referred to garrisoned regiments, though. Given that even current Codex fluff still talks of Imperial Guard regiments being allowed to settle down after having survived the decades of their tour of duty (think Roman Legion style), this might still apply.

I suppose in some way it might also be useful to take inspiration from real life mixed regiments into consideration if one wants to keep things at such a level of realism. How did the Soviets do it, for example? I confess this is one topic where my own WW2 amateur knowledge is sadly insufficient.

Boss Gitsmasha said:

Yes, that's simply one of those cases where you as a player have to decide which "version" of Commissar you like more / which one you want to follow in your game. Cain differs from the "GW standard" in more than just his personality; apparently he was also raised in a Schola that for some inexplicable reason did not practice the usual gender segregation, had very relaxed rules for its teachers, and educated future Commissar Cadets and Sororitas Novices on-site by senior representatives of said organisations rather than having progena raised by Drill-Abbots before shipping them off to other Imperial Adepta for specialised training. Not to mention that Cain could have easily opted to become a lowly civilian scribe if he never actually wanted to get himself into danger and face the Emperor's enemies on the battlefield, but of course this would not have fit the author's idea for the story.

It's all a question of which sources you want to go by for your personal interpretation of the setting.

They do a lot of stuff with the children of Imperial servants, just due to the huge variety imposed upon the Imperium by the simple fact of its immense size. So yeah there are probably some units that have trickleback in the form of Guardsmens' children taking up the life from being a camp follower. That doesn't mean the Scholam isn't the primary destination of orphans.

And the Soviets segregated their infantry units, though there weren't many all female ones. Women tended more toward piloting and irregular infantry (partisans and snipers), with some tank regiments I believed. I'd say most Imperial Guard regiments are segregated, with cases like the Ghosts and Cain's Valhallan's being the general exception, wherein they both became mixed through reinforcements. Though as stated earlier, the Imperium is a big place, so you're bound to find all sorts of arrangments (the Horus Heresy book Legion presents an interesting arrangment in the form of the Geno Five-Two Chiliad).

Stick the in most dangerous missions until the impending pregnancy and the Guardwomen are no longer an issue. Problems solved.

DW

Blood Pact said:

Hm, our interpretations of the setting differ in this detail, then. To me, it just doesn't seem practical to secure interstellar transportation for some unimportant Guardsman's infant; space travel just isn't common enough for the Imperium to afford such a policy. And if we'd be talking children of newly raised regiments, I would assume that they simply stay behind on the parent's homeworld to be raised by relatives, the tribe, or the Hive gang, or perhaps non-Schola orphanages and individual Preachers. Seeing that a world has a degree of control over what troops to nominate for the tithe, parents might even be able to "opt out" (depending on the planet in question) if their children would otherwise have to be abandoned.

Matter of perception, I guess?

Blood Pact said:

That was true for WW1 (with special "Women's Death Battallions" being formed), but in WW2 there were no segregated infantry units at all - instead women served in the same units as the men did (also see this picture, supposedly the 8th Guards division of the 62nd Army on the streets of Odessa). There were, however, all-female air force, anti-air and sniper formations. Some of them, like the 586th interceptor squadron, started out as all-female but became mixed later on, whereas anti-air became and remained some sort of a woman's domain throughout the war. I've also heard of female tankers, but was unable to dig up anything about their units.

There is frustratingly little information about life in such units, or special regulations or individual stories. I keep hoping someone may have spotted other sources I've not yet seen. Guess most sources are in Russian…

DW: Grimdark. I could totally see the Munitorum having relocation to a Punitive Battalion as a punishment for getting pregnant. :D

I would assume mandatory contraceptives are given out - mixing them into the rations sounds about right. Castrating the male parts of the regiment does absolutely nothing as the women could still get pregnant from other sources. That being said, I don't think anything permanent would be done - life is the Emperor's currency, after all, and it certainly wouldn't do to have the new nobility of a conquered planet (which is the future any guard regiment aspires to, after all) be incapable of producing offspring.

Lynata said:

No I'm actually saying the same thing. You've just misunderstood. I'm not saying they ferry around the children of some pissant Guardsmen when they die, or even when they're alive for that matter (save as part of the standard compliment of camp followers). When I say they're going to be raised in to the regiments of their parents, I mean it's going to happen -right there-, in this thick of it more or less. They're surrounded by experienced soldiers who can bring them up to form, they hardly need to be shipped back to some training facility on the regiment's homeworld. In this case I'm talking just about the children that are produced over years of campaigning, not the ones left back home from before they were raised and shipped out.

But as usual, this is the Imperium, and it's lunacy to say anything is ever done in any uniform way, when this is the same Imperium that actually loses whole armies (meaning hundreds of thousands, or even millions of soldiers). Some camp followers probably stay followers all their life, growing up to fill the roles of those who die or other wise move on somewhere else.

My bad, I think I misunderstood your sentence about the Schola then.

And yes, there's certainly a lot of room for coming up with all sorts of own ideas. One of the primary reasons why the Imperium was written up to be so big and diverse, after all.

Given a Schola Progenium tends to be heavily staffed by the children of Imperium militaries, they probably get shipped there with some regularity. Its pretty much inevitable anyways, and has some advantages compared to the very minor, temporary loss of a single soldier, which would be for a few weeks at worst in most regiments: Your army is replenishing its stock of green recruits and support staff throughout a long campaign, with generally assured loyalty.

Consider a Fortress World like Cadia, where its how the entire planet operates…

Blood Pact said:

This doesn't address the issue of pregnancy since the child in question is adopted, but this kind of situation is exactly depicted in the Gaunt's Ghosts series, specifically The Armour of Contempt. Tona Criid adopts two children in book 3, and by the time of Contempt (book 10) the eldest, who has spent most of his life in the Ghost's contingent of camp followers and assorted hangers-on, has reached the age where he can join the Guard, and does so. Like you suggest, he's ridiculously well-prepared, having grown up amongst top-tier Guardsman all his life who were always happy to teach this kid tips and tricks.

Abnett chose to create (I assume) something called RIP, for Reindoctrination, something, and Prepatory (I think, this is all off the top of my head) which is a constantly running bootcamp for both new recruits such as Dalin Criid, people doing said camp as punishment, and whatever the other category I'm forgetting is. So yes, it's Black LIbrary "canon," but the idea has definitely been explored by one of their established authors.

HTMC said:

It's Retraining, Indoctrination and Punishment actually. Indoctrination for the new blood, Punishment for the screw-ups and Retraining for… I'm not sure. People recovering from injuries and possible augmetics, like Merrt? Specialists that retrained into new specialties out of necessity (like a tanker regiments being retrained as infantry after losing all their hard-to-replace tanks)?

Penpen said:

Ah ok, that sounds much more correct :-P Thanks for the clarification.

Isn't this issue perfect to bring up during regiment creation? The Imperial Guard is big, and each regiment probably has it's own rules to a certain extent. This needen't solely up to the GM. Bring the players in on the discussion and decision, and at the least, no one will be blind-sided by it.

Well this is what happened in afghanistan.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2205803/Soldier-baby-frontline-Doctors-sent-UK-Army-girl--didnt-know-pregnant--gives-birth-Taliban-raid.html?ICO=most_read_module

Otherwise, I think it would be rare for female soldiers getting pregnant even if no contraception would be used. Severe stress, overly physical activity and poor nutrition is all known causes for women to stop ovulating and menstruating entirely. Just look at elite gymnastics women and those afflicted with anorexia nervosa, you get the point. In fact so rare that there maybe is no procedures to handle it. I definitely dont think that the imperium would do preventive surgery on every woman just for the abysmal risk of somenone getting pregnant, in that case they would probably start to operate away peoples appendices first beacuse appendicitis ought to be more common on the field than unexpected pregnancy..