In the mid-1980s, women with children under the age of six were banned from joining the Sea Org, as Scientology no longer wanted it to provide child care for the very young. A new policy was formally enacted in 1996 which banned Sea Org members from having children at all, as they were seen as "interfering with the productivity" of the staff. Ex-members of Scientology have said that they were pressured to terminate their pregnancies to comply with the policy. According to Claire Headley, somewhere between sixty and eighty percent of the women on the base had had at least one abortion, with some claiming indigence to get the county to pay for the procedure. Reitman comments: "If a pregnant woman refused, she would be separated from her husband, put on heavy manual labor, and vigorously 'sec checked' . If she still refused to get an abortion, she would be sent from the base in disgrace, alone." Scientology has denied that it has pressured anyone into having an abortion and says that it does not consider pregnant women to be "degraded beings."