On Disqus. A Housekeeping Post

Some of you have had trouble commenting with Disqus.  I'm not quite sure what the problem is or was but I finally realized I hadn't enabled commenting as a guest.  Now that the option has been enabled I hope the problem is solved.  If not, please toss me an e-mail and I will pursue the issue with Disqus folk.

On the old comments:  For reasons that would take too long to explain in detail (and would show why one shouldn't start changing stuff in the last possible week), the only way I could add the 100,000 plus old comments to the blog would seem to be essentially manually.  I have the comments saved.  What I don't have saved is any easy way to connect them to all the correct posts on the blog.  My apologies for that.

Debating the Causes of the Connecticut School Massacre

Content:  Violence


And then the discussions the Connecticut slaughter has started:

First, the conservative Christian fundamentalist politician Mike Huckabee tells us that the Connecticut school killings happened because God was locked out of schools:

HUCKABEE: Ultimately, you can take away every gun in America and somebody will use a gun. When somebody has an intent to do incredible damage, they’re going to find a way to do it… People will want to pass new laws, but unless you change people’s hearts, they’re our transition to the pastor side. This is a heard [sic] issue, it’s not something, laws don’t change this kind of thing.
CAVUTO: How could God let this happen?
HUCKABEE: Well, you know, it’s an interesting thing. When we ask why there is violence in our schools, but we’ve systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools have become a place for carnage because we’ve made it a place where we don’t want to talk about eternity, life, responsibility, accountability? That we’re not just going to have to be accountable to the police, if they catch us. But one day, we will stand in judgment before God. If we don’t believe that, we don’t fear that.

Poor, poor man.  I feel sorry for him, to be honest.  He's grasping at straws, given that the mass killers usually off themselves at the end of their feast.  Also, that heathen Europe is not seeing the expected numbers of mass killings at schools which would follow from Huckabee's theory.

But mostly I feel sorry for him because he is so failing in both Christian love and in his attempt to bolster the NRA message.  So is another wingnut, Bryan Fischer.

My conclusion:  Any number of dead children is an acceptable price for the freedom to bear arms.

My second conclusion:  This is NOT a "well-regulated militia" which is what the Second Amendment to the Constitution refers to.


Second, the Michigan Republicans (the Ringwraiths) said this:

Hours after the terrible shooting in a Newtown, Connecticut elementary school, the Michigan House Republicans issued demanded that Governor Rick Snyder (R) sign a bill that would make it easier for people to receive a gun permit and open up “gun free zones,” including schools. A statement attributed to Press Secretary Ari B. Adler shrugged off any link between guns in schools and school shootings:
What happened in Connecticut, however, is not because of nor related in any way to actions taken by the Michigan House yesterday in approving Senate Bill 59. …
It is the belief of many representatives in our caucus that it is criminals who have no intention of following any law that are the perpetrators of such heinous crimes as school shootings. Strict gun-control laws do not stop criminals from committing evil acts, they merely infringe on the rights of law-abiding citizens who might be able to take action against evil if given the chance.

Fascinating.  Perhaps we should arm kindergarten students?  Teachers?  What kind of training would be required to guarantee that "well-regulated militia?"  And when it comes to following laws, note that the weapons in today's massacre were legally acquired. 

My conclusion:  Any number of dead children is an acceptable price for the freedom to bear arms.

My second conclusion:  This is NOT a "well-regulated militia" which is what the Second Amendment to the Constitution refers to.

And then there is this request from the Michigan Ringwraiths:

Adler’s statement concludes by saying “Regardless of where anyone stands on the gun-rights debate, however, we will encourage everyone to try to refrain from politicizing the tragedy in Connecticut.”

After he just politicized the tragedy? 

Third, given that the conservatives believe an armed society is a safer society, how about the actual listing of the mass killings in the recent decades?  Pay attention to which country staged most of them:

A gunman at a Connecticut elementary school has killed 27 people, including 20 children - one of the world's worst mass shootings. Here are some others:
    •    August 5 2012: Army veteran Wade Michael Page kills five men and one woman and wounds three other people, including a police officer, before taking his own life at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin outside Milwaukee.
    •    July 20 2012: At least 12 people are killed when a gunman enters a cinema in Aurora, Colorado, releases a canister of gas and then opens fire during the opening night of the Batman movie The Dark Knight Rises. James Holmes, a 24-year-old former graduate student at the University of Colorado, has been charged over the deaths.
    •    March 11 2012: Sixteen Afghan villagers, including nine children, are killed during a pre-dawn attack. Army prosecutors have charged Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, 39.
    •    July 22 2011: Confessed mass killer Anders Behring Breivik kills 77 in Norway in twin attacks: a bombing in Oslo and a shooting massacre at a youth camp outside the capital. The self-styled anti-Muslim militant admitted both attacks.
    •    November 5 2009: Thirteen soldiers and civilians are killed and more than two dozen wounded when a gunman walks into the Soldier Readiness Processing Centre at Fort Hood, Texas, and opens fire. Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Hasan is charged with 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder.
    •    April 30 2009: Farda Gadyrov, 29, enters the prestigious Azerbaijan State Oil Academy in the capital, Baku, armed with an automatic pistol and clips. He kills 12 people before killing himself as police close in.
    •    March 10 2009: Michael McLendon, 28, kills 10 people - including his mother, four other relatives, and the wife and child of a local sheriff's deputy - across two rural Alabama counties. He then kills himself.
    •    September 23 2008: Matti Saari, 22, walks into a vocational college in Kauhajoki, Finland, and opens fire, killing 10 people and burning their bodies with firebombs before shooting himself fatally in the head.
    •    November 7 2007: After revealing plans for his attack in YouTube postings, 18-year-old Pekka-Eric Auvinen kills eight people at his high school in Tuusula, Finland.
    •    April 16 2007: Seung-Hui Cho, 23, kills 32 people and himself on the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg, Virginia.
    •    April 26 2002: Robert Steinhaeuser, 19, who had been expelled from school in Erfurt, Germany, kills 13 teachers, two former classmates and policeman, before committing suicide.
    •    April 20 1999: Students Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, opened fire at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, killing 12 classmates and a teacher and wounding 26 others before killing themselves in the school's library.
    •    April 28 1996: Martin Bryant, 29, bursts into cafeteria in seaside resort of Port Arthur in Tasmania, Australia, shooting 20 people dead. Driving away, he kills 15 others. He was captured and imprisoned.
    •    March 13 1996: Thomas Hamilton, 43, kills 16 kindergarten children and their teacher at a primary school in Dunblane, Scotland, and then kills himself.
    •    October 16 1991: A deadly shooting rampage takes place in Killeen, Texas, as George Hennard opens fire at a Luby's Cafeteria, killing 23 people before taking his own life. Twenty others were wounded in the attack.
    •    June 18 1990: James Edward Pough shoots people at random in a General Motors Acceptance Corp office in Jacksonville, Florida, killing 10 and wounding four, before killing himself.
    •    December 6 1989: Marc Lepine, 25, bursts into Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique college, shooting at women he encounters, killing nine and then himself.
    •    August 19 1987: Michael Ryan, 27, kills 16 people in small market town of Hungerford, England, and then shoots himself dead after being cornered by police.
    •    July 12 1976: Edward Charles Allaway, a custodian in the library of California State University, Fullerton, fatally shoots seven fellow employees and wounds two others.
    •    August 20 1986: Pat Sherrill, 44, a postal worker who was about to be fired, shoots 14 people at a post office in Edmond, Oklahoma. He then kills himself.
    •    July 18 1984: James Oliver Huberty, an out-of-work security guard, kills 21 people in a McDonald's restaurant in San Ysidro, California. A police marksman kills Huberty.
    •    August 1 1966: Charles Whitman opens fire from the clock tower at the University of Texas at Austin, killing 16 people and wounding 31.

And yes, the mass killers listed here are all men and most of them young men.  Perhaps mental health care needs to face that issue better?  Perhaps guns shouldn't be so easy to acquire?  Perhaps we should stop glorifying violence in the popular culture views of ideal masculinity?  Time for some tough questions about entitlement? 

You can sign a petition for more serious gun control here.

To The Dead Children

This is the song of the earth to all the children who have died in wars and acts of terrorism, or maybe a faint echo of it:

These are my children, the dead ones, the beloved: the ones covered in mud and dirt, the bloodied ones, the limbless ones, the ones who were scattered by bombs like crumbs thrown for the birds. These are my children: the burned ones, the raped ones, the starved ones, the buried ones. See how beautiful they all are, my beloved children.

I seek for them everywhere, I call for them and at nightfall I find them. I gather them to me and give them sleep. The night I turn into a silken shawl, the sky into a blue blanket. I weave cradles and nests out of my hair, and I find a place for each one of my children, however hurt and frightened.

My lap is wide enough for all of them and their pain, and I give them dreams of pine forests, of fresh streams in sunlight, of young foxes gambolling in a clearing. I give them dreams of peace and quiet, of stars and sailboats, of flowers and meadows. I give them dreams of snow and sun and sweetness. I give them what was taken away from them and when I cannot do that I give them oblivion and rest. And the wind sings a lullaby, gently, in all my tongues.

It is my milk that feeds all, and my tears that sate all thirst, and these children, my beloved, will never lack food or drink or a place to slumber in my lap or a peace that cannot be broken.

Re-posted from here  because of the mass killings of children in Connecticut.

The Cartoon That Never Gets Old, Sadly

Is this one.  I've had two experiences of that generalization just today.  O well.  At least I always have work for this blog.

Business Stories And Women's Issues

I'm passing on these two links for your reading.  First, the pro-life dry cleaner which puts "Choose Life" messages on its wire hangers.  I've decided not to comment on that any more lest something rather weird pops out of my keyboard...

Second, this  prank about Victoria's Secret.  I fully get why the firm is not too pleased about it and I also suspect that the prank wasn't quite legal.  But the basic product idea is fantastic and could be very profitable for Victoria's Secret.   They could expand their market share and use the prank to get new customers.

More On The Danish Childlessness-Is-Death Study

Which I have now read, thanks to very generous Santa Claus/Father Christmas readers.  The report on the study is a very short one.  It only lists the final figures, not the stages of getting to them.  But what is shown looks OK to me, i.e., I don't have to add study criticisms to the earlier popularization criticisms.

Still, I learned something important from reading the report itself:  The manner in which its authors explained the psychiatric illness findings.  Several popularizations mentioned them:

This site gives us false (well, incomplete)  information:

The study also examined the mental health aspects of failing to conceive and found that childless couples were twice as likely to suffer mental illness as those who adopted children.

The study found no statistically significant differences in mental health aspects (with the possible exception of addiction) between those who had a biological child through the fertility treatment and those who failed to have one.  That statement should have compared the adopting group to both those who had a biological child and those who did not but didn't adopt.

This site gets the basic numbers right:

And while the study didn’t show any difference in psychiatric illness between people who had children using IVF and those who did not, the parents who ended up adopting children were half as likely to be diagnosed with mental illness.

It was the adopting group which did better than the other two groups in terms of mental health.

But that doesn't really make much sense as a part of a hypothesis about the impact of children on one's mental health-being, unless having biological children is somehow bad or neutral for the parents' mental health, while adopting is good.

And indeed, the authors explain that the finding might be caused by the way adopting parents in Denmark are screened or by other factors not related to the basic thesis of the study:

The rate ratios in parents who adopt are surprising. Perhaps this is related to survival bias, as Danish adoption regulations mandate that a fertility treatment must be completed before an adoption process can begin. Alternatively, parents who adopt could be a selected group, as prospective parents’ health and economic condition are evaluated by the National Adoption Board. The rate of adoption is higher among affluent parents, 1.75 (1.46–2.08), but unrelated to the Charlson comorbidity index (p=0.93). Thus, the event of becoming an adoptive parent may not be exogenous given the covariates and the assumption for the natural experiment may be violated.
Our analyses show that childlessness has little impact on the rate of psychiatric illness. This lends support to the conjecture that previous reports of higher risks in the childless8–10 may actually reflect reverse causality, as individuals with an undiagnosed or insidious psychiatric illness are more likely to be childless and, subsequently, diagnosed with a psychiatric illness. However, our results show that individuals who adopt are at lower risk of psychiatric illness. It is likely that this lower rate is an artefact as mentioned above. Consistent with previous studies, our results suggest that the rate of substance use is higher in the childless.

Why bother writing about this?  Because those tiny sentences in the popularizations will float around inside people's heads, and having facts wrong is not that good.

Also, I'm aiming to bore away all remaining readers.

The Ringwraiths in Michigan

The Republicans in the Michigan House just turned the state into a "Right To Work" state.  Thousands are protesting outside the House. 

Before today's move in those class wars, on the side of the capital-owners, the Michigan Republicans were busy giving health care providers the right to refuse all care (except for emergency care) on various ethical grounds.  They also sneaked an extra provision to Blue Cross bill to make insurance for elective abortions (defined as all but those required to save the woman's life) only available through an optional rider.  Currently 80% of private health insurance plans in Michigan cover abortion costs.  That would pretty much now become 0%.

But all that pales in audacity (perhaps because we are used to the way women's issues are treated) when compared to the Michigan "Right To Work" moves, and this is why I bring back the idea that the recent crop of Republican governors in various states (including Ohio and Wisconsin) are nazgüls or Ringwraiths, from the Lord of the Rings trilogy by Tolkien.  These guys:

What about those moves?  Governor Rick Snyder never campaigned on this issue.  It appears to have suddenly materialized, as if by magic, and, presto!, who it is who has the right to work (or the right to pursue grievances about it) dramatically changed:

But as Snyder prepares to sign historic legislation making Michigan the nation's 24th right-to-work state, he'll inevitably be lumped by his detractors with those firebrand Republicans, a distinction that the governor had long sought to avoid.
“I didn’t do this to get into the politics of it,” Snyder said on MSNBC Tuesday afternoon of the fight. He said the issue reached a “critical mass” after organized labor unsuccessfully pushed a ballot initiative this November that would have established a right to collective bargaining in the Michigan constitution.
Snyder had previously said that pursuing this legislation was not on his agenda. But Republicans in the statehouse, whose majorities in the House and Senate will be narrower next year due to the 2012 elections, revived the long-dormant proposal with Snyder's eventual blessing.
"Once we had the support that we had, the next step was convincing the governor that this was a good thing," said state Republican Rep. Marty Knollenberg, a primary sponsor of the bill in the House. "It certainly started from the legislature, and then it was presented to the governor … I think he was sort of taking a wait-and-see attitude. It wasn’t on his priority list, as he indicated."

Another reason for using the nazgül label for these Republicans is that they truly have been almost magically good at the way they offer voters (of whom most belong to the labor class, after all) the opportunity to torpedo their own incomes and how many of those voters accept all that as a great idea!   The magic trick to is first attack unions in the public sector!

That way voters regard themselves largely as the ones paying the wage bill, not as the workers who are going to earn less in a Right To Work state.   Because that's what statistics tell us:  Right To Work laws are good for firms,  not so good for workers.

All this is part of the Republican goal to Kill All The Unions, and the reason for that is obvious:  Large firms facing tiny single individual workers in pay negotiations, one at a time, are going to make a better deal for the firm than large firms facing a unified front of workers in such negotiations.

That is the theoretical basis for why the Right To Work laws will ultimately hurt all the working stiffs, even those who now rejoice over the idea that they don't have to pay any union fees to work in a unionized firm.

That's the freedom of association argument about the Right To Work, that nobody should be forced to join a union in order to get a job.*  But here's the snag in that argument, and the reason why such laws would most likely mean the death of unions:

Opponents argue that right-to-work laws restrict freedom of association, and limit on the sorts of agreements individuals acting collectively can make with their employer, by prohibiting workers and employers from agreeing to contracts that include "fair share fees". This creates a free rider problem^[13][14] since unless non-union employees pay fair share fees, they are benefiting from collective bargaining without paying union dues. Thus, the services provided to them by the union contract are being subsidized by paying union members.

It's that "free rider" bit that really matters.  Just think about it.  You are getting a job in a unionized firm where the pay and the benefits are good because of the union activity.  But now the state has introduced Right To Work legislation, and you can get that job and all its goodies without paying one cent in union fees!

The selfishly logical thing is not to pay those fees.  But because that is the selfishly logical thing, most other workers think the same way, the union revenues decline and over time its ability to get better pay and benefits disappears.  Poof!

A comparable example:  Suppose we make taxes wholly voluntary.  Do you think the same public services would then be forthcoming?

-----
*I was astonished at some of the comments attached to various news stories about Michigan's Right To Work change.  Almost nobody seemed to understand the free rider problem, not even the supporters of unions.

If I Close The Tap Will Water Stop Running? The Texas Birth Control Experiment.

A peculiar thing happened in Texas!  Its lawmakers decided to do away with funding Planned Parenthood for political forced-birth reasons, even though this meant that many poor women would no longer have access to contraceptives.

And lo and behold!  Something utterly unexpected happened:

When state lawmakers passed a two-year budget in 2011 that moved $73 million from family planning services to other programs, the goal was largely political: halt the flow of taxpayer dollars to Planned Parenthood clinics.
Now they are facing the policy implications — and, in some cases, reconsidering.
The latest Health and Human Services Commission projections being circulated among Texas lawmakers indicate that during the 2014-15 biennium, poor women will deliver an estimated 23,760 more babies than they would have, as a result of their reduced access to state-subsidized birth control. The additional cost to taxpayers is expected to be as much as $273 million — $103 million to $108 million to the state’s general revenue budget alone — and the bulk of it is the cost of caring for those infants under Medicaid.
Ahead of the next legislative session, during which lawmakers will grapple with an existing Medicaid financing shortfall, a bipartisan coalition is considering ways to restore some or all of those family planning dollars, as a cost-saving initiative if nothing else.
“I know some of my colleagues felt like in retrospect they did not fully grasp the implications of what was done last session,” said Representative Donna Howard, Democrat of Austin, who said she had been discussing ways to restore financing with several other lawmakers in both parties.

The bolds are mine.   That lawmakers would fail to fully grasp what will happen when low-income women no longer can find affordable birth control, well, perhaps Texas should elect slightly smarter lawmakers?

The signs of reduced access have been clear for a while:

A new report published in the New England Journal Of Medicine, part of a three-year study intended as a direct response to Texas' drastic family planning cuts in 2011, finds that 53 clinics in the state have closed as a result of a 66 percent reduction in funds championed by conservative lawmakers. But will legislators listen to this new, Texas-focused research that bodes ill for the health and well being of Texans trying to plan their families? Or will they continue to wage a culture war that invigorates a conservative base and decimates programs that do demonstrable good—and that also save money?

...

It bears repeating: for every $1 investment in family planning, taxpayers save $3.74 in Medicaid expenditures.

It's not just access to contraceptives those clinic losses mean but also access to PAP smears and other preventive care.

But Planned Parenthood probably will not be refunded, what with that forced-birth approach of the Texas Republicans.  Indeed, one might argue that they are achieving exactly what they desire!  Too bad that it comes with a taxpayer cost,  of course.

I found various statements from the Texas governor Rick Perry most interesting.  When the federal appeals court refused to reconsider the arguments about Texas barring Planned Parenthood from its Women's Health Program (a victory for Texas),  Governor Perry said:

"Today's ruling affirms yet again that in Texas the Women's Health Program has no obligation to fund Planned Parenthood and other organizations that perform or promote abortion. In Texas we choose life, and we will immediately begin defunding all abortion affiliates to honor and uphold that choice."

But now his office tells us:

Asked whether Gov. Rick Perry would support returning money to family planning programs, his spokeswoman Lucy Nashed left the door open. “Last session the Legislature had to prioritize,” she said, speaking of the state’s budget woes.
“Every two years we take a fresh look at our resources and our needs.”

Interesting prioritizing, that.

The Sky Is Falling? Or The Scary Future? On Older Parenthood

The New Republic has an article  on the possible consequences of people having children at older ages.  The headline:

How Older Parenthood Will Upend American Society

The scary consequences of the grayest generation.

So the society will get upended and the consequences are going to be scary.  By this time, of course, all Echidne's cynical and logical bits have started their engines.  This looks like a topic where we are going to get strong opinions, perhaps for more clicks and advertising income. 

Or it could be, of course, that the sky really is falling, that when the usual age for having a first child is, say,  forty the society indeed will be upended.  Fertility rates will bottom, congenital problems in children will go through the roof, and who is going to take care of all those still adolescent children when the parents die of old age?  But of course the usual age at having one's first child is nowhere near forty.   The author, Judith Shulevitz, herself gives us the actual averages:

American first-time mothers have aged about four years since 1970—as of 2010, they were 25.4 as opposed to 21.5. That average, of course, obscures a lot of regional, ethnic, and educational variation. The average new mother from Massachusetts, for instance, was 28; the Mississippian was 22.9. The Asian American first-time mother was 29.1; the African American 23.1. A college-educated woman had a better than one-in-three chance of having her first child at 30 or older; the odds that a woman with less education would wait that long were no better than one in ten.

The rest of the article mostly ignores these facts and focuses on the extreme upper tail of the age-at-first-child distribution, discussing those cases as if they were the New Average.  Hence my skepticism about the whole treatment.  To see what I mean, have a look at this quote:

As a result, the twenties have turned into a lull in the life cycle, when many young men and women educate themselves and embark on careers or journeys of self-discovery, or whatever it is one does when not surrounded by diapers and toys. This is by no means a bad thing, for children or for adults. Study after study has shown that the children of older parents grow up in wealthier households, lead more stable lives, and do better in school. After all, their parents are grown-ups.

Yet all those average ages of having one's first child are in the twenties. If "many" young men and women educate themselves and embark on careers or journeys of self-discovery, they seem to do that in the company of those diapers and toys and so on.

Here's the problem I have with the article.  Once I'm offered a beginning which tells us about a handful of septuagenarian men and women having babies and then a continuation which discusses the author's own experiences with assisted fertility and her child's problems I have great difficulty assuming that the rest of the story will be balanced.  Perhaps it is not even intended to be balanced but an alarm bell about where the society might be going if nothing is done to stop that?

Yet the medical information we are given in the article is probably of value, always keeping in mind that the specialists in, say, infertility treatments don't see a cross-section of all would-be-parents and may develop their global views only on the basis of what their daily work shows them. It's also salutary to remember that the diagnoses given to various problems in children have changed over time and that the diagnosis of, say, the autism spectrum, is given much more frequently now than was the case in the past (when only the most severe cases came to the attention of the health care system.)

This is not to deny that having children later in life wouldn't have additional risks for the children but to note the balance discussing them requires.  Because of the way this article begins, and to some extent continues, I lost my confidence in it.  The topic is important enough to cover from a more neutral ground, without those attempts to make it "scary."

Yet the author of the article, Judith Shulevitz, has some interesting points to make which differ from your run-of-the-mill "aging mothers" articles.  For example, she discusses the medical risks the child can experience from both older mothers and older fathers, and she points out the asymmetry of reproduction costs in most societies, though in the context of a possible population dearth (and not in the context of older parenthood) and what could be done about persuading people to have more children:

Demographers and sociologists agree about what those policies are. The main obstacle to be overcome is the unequal division of the opportunity cost of babies. When women enjoy the same access to education and professional advancement as men but face penalties for reproducing, then, unsurprisingly, they don’t. 

It's not quite clear if having higher fertility rates on a global level is good for us, given the global climate change and the likely consequences of trying to provide everyone on this planet the standard of living only some enjoy today.  But there is a fairness reason for equalizing the costs of childbearing between men and women, and it is also likely that the kinds of policies certain European countries have adopted --- paid parental leaves, guaranteed job on return to work, good childcare, more father involvement in childcare --- would all help people to have children at younger ages.  They allow women to both have children and remain in the labor force and because of the subsidies they allow younger families to have children at at time when their resources are otherwise stretched.

After reading the above quote, I immediately wanted to juxtapose it with the medical advice given earlier in the article:

If you’re a doctor, you see clearly what is to be done, and you’re sure it will be. “People are going to change their reproductive habits,” said Alan S. Brown, a professor of psychiatry and epidemiology at the Columbia University medical school and the editor of an important anthology on the origins of schizophrenia. They will simply have to “procreate earlier,” he replied. As for men worried about the effects of age on children, they will “bank sperm and freeze it.”

If "people" will have to procreate earlier but men can "bank sperm and freeze it." who are those "people" who simply must procreate earlier?

Now, medical advice is often given in that bark-bark form, of course, and physicians are not necessarily experts in incentives and so on.  But I have read versions of that from non-medical writers, and the gist of the advice is the same:  Women must simply adjust to their biological clocks or we all will face  horrible consequences.  It's the old all-whip-no-carrot rule which has the extra benefits that the costs of the necessary behavior would still be mostly born by women.