The Possible Spread of Conscience Clauses?

I was reading this about a possible conscience clause in the US military:

Some House Republicans are pushing for inclusion of a “conscience protection” clause in the final version of Pentagon budget legislation that could enable discrimination against gay service members, according to LGBT advocates familiar with conference committee negotiations.
The measure could be made final as soon as today.
Two LGBT advocates, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said House Republican conferees working on the final version of the fiscal year 2013 defense authorization bill are pushing for language along the lines of the “conscience protections” in the House version of the legislation under Section 536. One source said this language is “very much in play” for being in the final version of the bill and is one of the final issues yet to be resolved as conferees wrap up the legislation.
Under the language, the U.S. military would have to “accommodate the conscience and sincerely held moral principles and religious beliefs of the members of the Armed Forces concerning the appropriate and inappropriate expression of human sexuality” and may not use these beliefs as the basis of any adverse personnel action or discrimination. Additionally, it would prohibit the U.S. military from taking action against military chaplains who decline to serve a particular service member based on religious beliefs.

It's hard to know if any of that is more than rumors at this point.  But it suddenly struck me that the concept of a conscience clause can be used far outside the topic of abortions and contraceptives in health care!  A conscience clause could legitimize any kind of discrimination, anywhere!  How very neat!

For instance, employers could say that they cannot hire women because taking women out of their homes is against their conscience.  Or employers could say that they need to hire workers of only one race because their conscience doesn't allow miscegenation.  And think of what scope religious beliefs would give to discrimination!  A very strict Muslim would oppose any mixing of the sexes at work or at school.  And so it goes.

Something so innocent-looking and so much a problem only for those "baby killers" can travel far, grow big and stand tall against the idea of fair treatment.

Sure, I'm going to the extremes with this post.  Still.

Guns And the Decline Of The Young Man: The Need To Be Deferential.

This is the connection Christy Wampole draws at the Opinionator blog of the New York Times.  The causal arrow her bow shoots is from the decline of the young man to mass shootings.  A snippet:

This is merely anecdotal evidence, not social science, but I believe that it is indicative of a sort of infection spreading in our collective brain, one that whispers to the American subconscious: “The young men are in decline.” They were once our heroes, our young and shining fathers, our sweet brothers, our tireless athletes, our fearless warriors, the brains of our institutions, the makers of our wares, the movers of our world. In the Western imagination, the valiance of symbolically charged figures like Homer’s Ulysses or the Knights of the Round Table remained unquestioned since their conception. However, as centuries progressed and stable categories faltered, the hero figure faces increasing precarity. Even if we consider the 20th century alone, we see this shift from World War II, when the categories of good and evil were firm, to later conflicts like the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, involving a disparity between what the government believed to be right and what much of the civilian population did.
Does the heroic young man still make sense today, or has his value already been depleted?

An interesting thesis.   I don't believe in it because I don't believe that young men have ever been "our heroes, our young and shining fathers, the movers of our world."  Most young men have never had that great powers, to move the world, and very few people of any type are heroes.  And what on earth is a "shining father?"  One decked with Christmas tree lights?

I also don't think that being "heroic" is a very common life objective for anyone.  Being heroic either requires something truly unusual (as in the case of these principals and teachers in the latest massacre), or it's just a stupid and false label for people who are OK citizens.

Wampole then continues:

If the soldier has largely been replaced by the video game character and the drone, if the mothers have proven that they can raise the children alone, if the corporations are less able or willing to guarantee the possibility of upward mobility and some level of respect that comes with title, if someone else can bring home the bacon, what is left for young men?
All this, and they still are not allowed to cry.

Here's where women enter the column.  Women have proved that they can raise children alone, that they can bring home the bacon, so what are young men needed for?  This juxtaposition smells ever-so-slightly of the argument that if women hadn't become workers in the labor market, if women had remained at home, safely married to a bread-winning husband, then these young men wouldn't have to go out and shoot lots of six-year-olds.

I don't think Wampole necessarily means that.  Or does she?  Who knows.  But a different way of putting the same argument would be to state that some men have trouble with changing sex roles and would prefer the old rules back, whatever their costs to others might be.  That's probably true.  But are those young men the group from which mass shooters come?  I don't think Wampole proves her case.  The examples she quotes do not fit the profiles of the most recent mass killers who are not economically deprived, unemployed or otherwise fighting hard times in their lives.  Indeed, most of them seem to have been still students.

Never mind.  Wampole does turn to that group next.  Her take is a slightly unusual one and it would have sat better without that preamble:

The angry white man has usurped the angry black man.
I would argue that maleness and whiteness are commodities in decline. And while those of us who are not male or white have enjoyed some benefits from their decline, the sort of violence and murder that took place at Sandy Hook Elementary will continue to occur if we do not find a way to carry them along with us in our successes rather than leaving them behind.

For women, things are looking up. We can vote, we can make more choices about our bodies than in decades past, we’ve made significant progress regarding fair pay, and more women are involved in American politics than ever before. The same can be said for minorities. However, because resources are limited, gains for women and minorities necessarily equal losses for white males. Even if this feels intuitively fair to many, including those white males who are happy to share resources for the greater benefit of the nation as a whole, it must feel absolutely distressing for those who are uncomfortable with change and who have a difficult time adjusting to the inevitable reordering of society.

From the civil rights and feminist movements of the 1960s and onward, young men – and young white men in particular – have increasingly been asked to yield what they’d believed was securely theirs. This underlying fact, compounded by the backdrop of violent entertainment and easy access to weapons, creates the conditions for thousands of young men to consider their future prospects and decide they would rather destroy than create.

Can you imagine being in the shoes of the one who feels his power slipping away? Who can find nothing stable to believe in? Who feels himself becoming unnecessary? That powerlessness and fear ties a dark knot in his stomach. As this knot thickens, a centripetal hatred moves inward toward the self as a centrifugal hatred is cast outward at others: his parents, his girlfriend, his boss, his classmates, society, life.

What do you think of that?  There may be something in a few parts of that quote.  But this society really is NOT telling white men that they are unnecessary.  If anything, it tells us that all the top places are still occupied by white men, that the churches are operated by white men, that politics is certainly much, much more male than female.

But my major counterargument is that Wampole's thesis doesn't explain the events in China.  China is not a feminist paradise but closer to a patriarchy.  The preference for sons there is strong, the political machine is overwhelmingly male.  Yet China, too, has had its cases of school attacks.  They are not mass shootings because of different gun laws but they are very similar in the selection of victims to the US situation.  Wampole's thesis doesn't explain those events.

Neither is Wampole showing us that the group of disgruntled white men she writes about is the group from which the school shooters come.  What I have read about past shooters and about Adam Lanza demonstrates a more complicated group of reasons, starting with social or psychological adjustment problems very early in life.

I'm also not convinced that today's young men would have had expectations of being treated as number ones however they behave.  That may have been (but probably wasn't) the case for those who were born in the 1950s, say, but not for the last twenty or thirty years.  After all, women started entering college in larger numbers by the early 1990s, Geraldine Ferraro was a vice-presidential candidate in the 1980s.

What is Wampole's cure for the malady that has infected white young men?  It is empathy:

Empathy could serve many of us: those who have not yet put themselves in the position of a person who is losing their power and those who can aim a gun at someone without imagining themselves on the other end of the barrel. For those of us who belong to a demographic that is doing increasingly better, a trained empathic reflex toward those we know to be losing for our gains could lead to a more deferential attitude on our part and could constitute an invitation for them to stay with us. To delight in their losses and aim at them the question, “How does it feel?” will only trigger a cycle of resentment and plant the seeds for vengeance. It is crucial to accommodate the pain of others.

A curious coincidence:  I was just working on the first draft of my perhaps-to-be-book, and came across various evolutionary psychology arguments which stated that women are naturally hard-wired for empathy,  men equally naturally not.   If empathy is natural for women, Wampole couldn't ask any from men and wouldn't have to ask for any from women.  We'd be bubbling over with it already.

And many people are.  Empathy is an extremely important tool.  Even I, a horrible feminazi, feel much empathy with those who are in pain, whether the reason for their pain meets my approval or not.

But "a more deferential attitude????"  From women?  Because that is what she writes.  Women should have a more deferential attitude towards angry young white men and that way no young white man would turn into a school killer.

I can't be reading that bit right.  But what other way is there to read it?  What does "a more deferential attitude" mean?  Bringing back a rank-order of men over women?  Serving all men in the family first?  Please give me more meat on the bones, Wampole.  Should we curtsey or what?

OK.  So I got angry, and I belong to the social group who is not allowed to be angry.  But surely empathy can be reconciled with equality?  Or is Wampole implying that equality is not sufficient?

And on that "delighting in their losses" bit:  I have never done anything of the sort.  My guess is that Wampole has read one or two of those "end-of-men" books and then generalizes from them to all women everywhere.

I get very tired over events such as the "end-of-men" faddish trend, written as if we already live in a matriarchy, as if all feminists are gloating over their past oppressors and so on.  Never mind how hard I write about the real issues (yes, outsourcing has cost us terribly in terms of blue-collar-traditionally-male-jobs, and, yes, we must encourage more boys, especially minority boys, to stay at school and attend college) and the imaginary issues (the mancession, the evil feminist matriarchy which really runs the world, how earning 70-80% of what men earn makes women the wealthier sex and so on), those faddish trends have a rich life of their own, fed by clicks and nasty comments and money.  It's very tiring.

To return to Wampole's column:  Is there anything useful in it?

I'm not sure if it has much to do with the school shootings, directly, but it does remind us of the fact that there never was a real movement similar to the waves of feminism among men, a movement which would have redefined men's roles the way feminism (and other forces) redefined women's roles.

The old roles are now like square pegs trying to fit into round holes, and it's high time to address that.  Yes, men are needed, just as all human beings are needed.  We all come with a bunch of talents and personality traits, and we need to find a way to make better fits between individuals and the society.  We should address the problems of men who have become  unemployed because of that outsourcing.  They should get real support, job training and jobs, psychological support and respect, just as women need those things.  We should address the real problems of young men, of all races.  We should discuss the violent aspects of the traditional definitions of masculinity and we should encourage young men in need to seek help.  We should also make sure that the help is there.

Men should also accept their changing roles in the family.

The new roles are better roles, I think.  They involve being a full parent, not just a disciplinarian who brings home money, to paraphrase the old definition of a male bread-winner.  The new roles mean being emotionally available to the children,  doing real parenting, being there, in one's totality, when one is there.

But many, if not most men, are already doing all that.  Many, if not most, young men are already adjusting to the society, finding their places and becoming useful members of it. 

Empathy is also important.  It's not uncommon in politics to dehumanize the opposition.  But ultimately it doesn't work.  Where I disagree with Wampole is in her hint that it's up to women, the new rulers of the world (tell that to women in most countries!  tell it to women in the US!), to do this work.  We ALL should be able to see the human in other people.

But nobody should demand deferential behavior from us just because the other person is male or white or belongs to some other traditionally privileged class.  Deferential behavior requires something worth being deferential about.  Good deeds, for instance.  Some greatness.

Empathy alone is insufficient, in any case.  If I have an infected finger because of a splinter, I don't baby the finger.  I dig out the splinter.  In some ways Wampole asks us to emphatize with the finger but pretend that the splinter is not there.  In other words, feminine empathy is most likely too weak a medicine for what ails those individuals who might become school killers.  It's too weak even for the problems of angry white men, if those are caused by receiving less privilege than was the case in the past.

Finally,  the assumption that various young school killers didn't receive adequate empathy is just an assumption, not a proven fact.  Perhaps they were given much empathy but they were unable to receive it?

Some Good News On Gun Control

We may achieve some minor steps in that direction.  President Obama has hinted at that and several pro-gun politicians have expressed some willingness to expand gun control laws.

Even Joe Scarborough has changed his mind on the topic:



It is probably human nature to find horrors striking very close to oneself emotionally more powerful than distant horrors.  It's our back-brain asking what the risk is and whether we should run or hide to avoid that "saber-toothed tiger" (it's always that animal, for some odd reason, in those prehistoric sagas).  These dead children looked like his children, they lived nearby and belonged to the same social class.  The horror struck almost at his home.

It takes effort to extend that empathy further and further out, though it can be done, and we should all work at that task.  Still, our imagination is stretched less when the victims remind us strongly of our own situation, our own children, our own neighborhoods.

Some of those responses could be racist or xenophobic.  But a considerable part, I believe, has to do with our limited empathic imagination.  When we hear of a disaster which has killed 10,000 people, our reaction cannot cope, cannot fathom such numbers, cannot grieve 10,000 times as much as we would grieve for one neighbor, one family member.  We would burst into small pieces should such a magnification be possible. 

So we resort to reading about the individuals in that disaster, their stories, their deaths, and that is how we slowly, very slowly accommodate the magnitude of the horror.  I think something of that sort happened to Scarborough, especially because the stories were so familiar to him, so close to his family.

Another human common desire is to want something good to come out of horrors, to want the deaths made meaningful that way.  I share that desire as I share the limping nature of my empathy.  I'd like these deaths not to be wasted, even though all such deaths ARE wasted.  I'd like changes to gun control to come from this massacre, I'd like to have a future where I never need to write of yet another shooting with multiple victims, with the usual questions about why the killer killed.  I'd like to have no news about gun murders to cover.

Nine Facts About Guns And Mass Shootings in the United States. What's Missing?

This is a good list, these nine facts about guns and mass shootings.  But, as usual, it omits the most obvious fact.  David Sirota addresses some of what was omitted  in his Salon piece, titled "Time To Profile White Men?"

Yesterday, during a cable news discussion of gun violence and the Newtown school shooting, I dared mention a taboo truism. During a conversation on MSNBC’s “Up With Chris Hayes,” I said that because most of the mass shootings in America come at the hands of white men, there would likely be political opposition to initiatives that propose to use those facts to profile the demographic group to which these killers belong. I suggested that’s the case because as opposed to people of color or, say, Muslims, white men as a subgroup are in such a privileged position in our society that they are the one group that our political system avoids demographically profiling or analytically aggregating in any real way. Indeed, unlike other demographic, white guys as a group are never thought to be an acceptable topic for any kind of critical discussion whatsoever, even when there is ample reason to open up such a discussion.

All interesting. concerning that "white" part of the group "white men."  But Sirota never got around to writing about the "men" part.  In fact, there's some evidence which suggests that some Asian men also carry out similar massacres, or try to, in places where it's hard to get hold of a gun.

The remaining invisible elephant is naturally the gender of those who carry out mass shootings.  It's overwhelmingly male. 

This does NOT mean that all men are somehow likely to run amok or that no women ever do.  Very, very few individuals do.   And there have been at least two cases of mass shootings by women in the United States,  though I had to search for those.  The cases by men are much more common, and because of the roughly equal numbers of men and women in the population, this difference deserves our attention, however uncomfortable looking at it might be.

Why is it not getting real attention?  I think the answer is probably the fact that men are regarded as the default when it comes to human beings.  It's hard for us to see men as part of some amorphous mass of maleness, the way we more easily have learned to regard individual women as such morsels of femaleness.  The latter is because women are not the default setting of "a human individual" in quite the same way.  Women almost always carry a small taint of their group membership, just as minorities always carry a small taint of their group membership, even when the individuals are men.

That's just the way "the default" is constructed in societies.  Thus, we talk about "black violence" (while actually meaning black male violence) but rarely about "white violence" or about "male violence."   Certain groups are invisible because they are regarded as the overall picture.  Paradoxically, the individuals belonging to the default group get to be treated mostly only as individuals.

That should be the goal for all of us, of course.  But in this particular example, it makes us look for only some possible solutions:  How did Adam Lanza differ from other young men of his race and social class?  What happened to him that didn't happen to them?  Did he shoot all those children because of an illness?

Those are not inappropriate questions.  But the invisible elephant about the most common gender of mass shooters turns other questions invisible.  Is there something about masculinity in the cultures which pushes men with certain problems to this direction but not women with the same problems?   Is the answer in our genes?  Some mutation which the xx protects women from?  Or does this have to do with who plays violent video games and why?  And what is the relation of these massacres to the generally higher rates of gun violence committed by men?

An obvious response to my arguments would be that everybody knows mass shooters are mostly men.  The fact is just obvious.  But ignoring the questions coming from that obvious fact, and the answers they may elicit, are lost if we simply skip over "what is obvious."

Guns Don't Kill People, People Kill People...

An electric lawnmower and a pair of nail scissors can both be used for cutting the grass, right?  It's the human being who cuts the grass, not the innocent lawnmower.

That's a different version of the argument I right now read everywhere on the Internet:  Some version of the guns-don't-kill-people-people-kill-people.  I think it shows the differences in effectiveness.

That's why guns are what we should talk about when it comes to horrible events such as the Connecticut school massacre.  Especially semi-automatic guns.

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.

Friday Fun: Rush LImbaugh and Camilla Paglia in The Same Earful!

Content warning:  If you listen to this audio your ears will detach, circle the whole globe and reattach themselves on the wrong sides of your head.  Upside-down and backwards.

Any logical parts of your brain will explode in blue smoke, after trying to make some sense out of the garbled word-salad and the odd juxtapositions and the utter total impression that you are consuming the equivalent of a scraped-from-the-kitchen-floor gourmet dinner, prepared by a mad-hatter-chef.  Well, two of those.

Finally, the assertion that Paglia is a feminist makes you scream so loud that your vocal cords will turn into a very small British pork pie.

But other than that, go ahead and have a good listening experience!

No children? You're Gonna Die Young!

Here's an interesting Danish study and its popularizations for you!  When I was going through several of the popular media summaries I had to go and bang my head against the garage door, to get some relief from the inanity of much of it.  To see why:

Let's start with some of those popularizations:

First:

By Maggie Fox, NBC News
They may feel like they are going to be the death of you, but having kids may not take years off your life. In fact, a study published Thursday shows that people who tried but failed to have children are two to four times more likely to die young than parents.
The startling findings support other research that shows childless couples don’t live as long as parents. They also add another piece to the puzzle: This one looks at people who either adopted children, or had them through fertility treatments.

Second:

People who have never had children are more likely to die prematurely and develop mental problems than those who have had children, researchers from Aarhus University, Denmark, reported in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

The authors added that the link between shorter lifespans, mental health and childlessness is particularly noticeable among women.

The belief that having children may shorten our lives is a myth, the researchers explained, as the reverse seems to be the case.

Third:

Dec. 5, 2012 -- Many parents might good-naturedly scoff at the notion, but a new study shows that being a parent may help you live longer.
Danish researchers compared men and women who had children with those who did not to see if the childless were more likely to die early.
They were. "Childless couples are at increased risk of dying early of all causes," says researcher Esben Agerbo, PhD, associate professor at Aarhus University in Aarhus, Denmark.
The benefit of parenthood on longevity was stronger for women than for men, says Agerbo.
The study findings echo those of previous research. It is published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

Look at those url codes in more detail!  The-secret-to-a-long-life-children!  Having-kids-doesn't-kill-you-after-all!   And note how we are offered  a causality going like this:

having children > you live longer

Not all the popularizations I read were that bad.  (That second one above is a real humdinger, making false claims, as is the whole piece it comes from).  But some that stuck closer to the abstract about the study included interesting little jabs and pushes which may be even worse.  Here's the now-with-more conservatism BBC website on the study:

Involuntary childlessness may increase the likelihood of early death, the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health reports.
The Danish study looked at more than 21,000 couples seeking IVF treatment.
They found women who were unsuccessful in having a child were four times more likely to die prematurely than women who had been mothers.
Critics stress that the risk of early death was low - with just 316 people in total dying over the 11 year study.
The authors of the paper also point out that their research suggests a link between childlessness and premature death and not a cause. They wrote: "Mindful that association is not the same thing as causation, our results suggest that the mortality rates are higher in the childless."
The researchers based their findings on data obtained from various population registers in Denmark on births, deaths and IVF procedures from 1994 to 2005.
During this time 21,276 childless couples registered for IVF treatment, 15,149 children were born and a total of 96 women and 220 men died.
Four times more likely
After analysis, the results suggested having a child cut the risk of early death, particularly among women.

That's the beginning of their piece.  A little bit later down it notes that mortality rate among the men was twice as high in the group which failed to have a baby.   This makes it certain that we see the problem as one of being a mother or not.   Then note this sentence in the above quote:

They found women who were unsuccessful in having a child were four times more likely to die prematurely than women who had been mothers.

Very sloppy writing, given that the whole sample in this study consisted of couples who sought fertility treatments.  A better way of writing it would be:

They found women who were unsuccessful in having a child were four times more likely to die prematurely than women who were unsuccessful in that endeavor.

If there is a propaganda story here it is one which suggests that women would live longer if only they had children. 

That's enough about the popularizations, though I would like to point out that even though the BBC asked other experts for their opinions, those experts pretty clearly were not aware of the actual piece of research they were asked to comment.  I base this on the fluffiness of their comments.

Then to the study itself. 

 Or to its abstract because I haven't obtained access to the study:

Background Childlessness increases the risk of premature mortality and psychiatric illness. These results might, however, be confounded by factors that affect both the chance of parenthood as well as the risk of premature death and psychiatric illness. 

Methods Using population-based health and social registers, we conducted a follow-up study of 21 276 childless couples in in vitro fertility treatment. 

Results The crude death rate ratio in women who become mothers to a biological child is 0.25 (95% CI 0.16 to 0.39). In other words, childless women experience a fourfold higher rate of death, that is, 4.02 (2.56 to 6.31). The analogous death rate in fathers is approximately halved: 0.51 (0.39 to 0.68) and 0.55 (0.32 to 0.96) associated with having a biological child and an adopted child, respectively. With substance use disorders being the exception, none of the crude rates of psychiatric illness in parents of a biological child were statistically distinguishable from the rates in the childless. These findings were slightly confounded by age, calendar year, income, education, somatic comorbidity and marital breakup. 

Conclusions Mindful that association is not causation, our results suggest that the mortality rates are higher in the childless. Rates of psychiatric illness do not appear to vary with childlessness, but the rate of psychiatric illness in parents who adopt is decreased.

With all due respect and understanding for those who write in a foreign language, that is an awfully poorly written abstract.   The first three sentences of the Results section must have something missing (that "in other words" bit)  and the "analogous" term doesn't refer to anything in what goes before.

I couldn't get very far with the abstract alone.  But what I have been able to gather from various sources is that the study looked at the death rates among 21 276 couples who had resorted to in vitro fertility treatments.   Here's one popularization on the data and study design:

In the study, which was published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, the scientists from Aarhus University looked at data from more than 21,000 couples who underwent IVF treatment between 1994 and 2005. They saw that 15,000 children were born and almost 1,600 were adopted during that time period. Unfortunately, 96 women and 200 men who were included in the study died.
Statistically, the death rate for childless women was four times as high as those who gave birth to their own child, while childless men were twice as likely to meet an early death. These findings caused the researchers to conclude that a couple who cannot conceive is at increased risk of early death.
Study co-author Esben Agerbo, an associate professor at Aarhus University in Aarhus, Denmark, pointed out that his team simply found a correlation and not a cause-and-effect relationship.
“My best guess is health behaviors,” he told WebMD. “When people have kids, they tend to live healthier.”
He suggested that having children promotes healthier and more responsible living as parents feel the need to both provide and set an example for their children.
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.

Can we trust that popularization?  Note that the abstract states that with the exception of substance abuse,  there was no difference between the mental health indicators of couples who succeeded in having a biological child and couples who did not succeed.   Yet the popularization tells us in that last sentence that there was!

Never mind.  Let's assume that the study was carried out properly, that it did, indeed find four times higher crude death rates among the women who failed to conceive after the treatment and twice as high crude death rates among the men whose partners failed to conceive after the treatment. 

What does this all mean?  

1.  Can we generalize from this study to everyone in the world?  Is a sample of people who are all seeking in vitro fertilization treatment just the same as a random sample of from the general population?   Is it OK for those popularizations (far above in my post)  to say what they did say : that children help us live longer, given that the sample in this study consisted of only people for whom fertility was large enough a problem that they resorted to in vitro fertilization?

I can think of a whole bunch of reasons why that would not be the case.   

First,  the infertility of some of the couples, at least, could have been caused by pre-existing ill health.  This ill health could make conceiving via in vitro fertilization less likely and it also could make premature death more likely.

Second, the infertility treatments themselves may have health risks for women.  Those who conceive stop any hormone treatments, for example, but those who have failed to conceive may continue the treatments for several more rounds.  The overall impact of the treatments themselves could cause fatal illness in some women among the failed-to-conceive group.

Third, wanting a child when one cannot have it may be a major stress factor in a person's life.  Major stress factors are a known health risk, and the longer they last the more likely it is that they affect either behavior or the health of the body itself.  Couples who failed to conceive live in that stress longer than couples who conceived early in the treatment.


2.  You may have noticed that my three points above all suggest reverse causality to explain the findings.  I'm not arguing that my suggestions are the correct ones, just that we cannot run quickly to the other extreme and argue that having children protects us from dying young. 

Esben Agerbo, one of the study co-authors, does warn us about correlation not necessarily being causation, and so does the study abstract.  Yet in that last quote where he is interviewed he offers a causal explanation for lower death rates of those who succeeded in the fertilization treatments:

Children promote healthier and more responsible living.

And that is probably true.  But is it the major causal arrow which explains these findings?  Let's put this into a diagram.  We have two simple options for the main arrow directions:

childlessness  >>>  ill health

ill health >>> childlessness

These simple options are not meant to be the only two possibilities.  My guess is that the lower one is the explanation which accounts for more involuntary childlessness, because most individuals born with severe health conditions never have children, for instance.  But the general explanation allows for a smaller arrow going in the direction, from having children to better health behavior, say.

You may have noticed that my three points about why the Danish sample cannot be seen as a perfect microcosm of the general population are all about the possibility that the causality mostly runs from ill health to childlessness or that at least the meaning of "childlessness" is closer to something of a major life trauma than the absence of children as such.

Conclusions

My apologies for not covering the actual study.  I couldn't get hold of it without paying thirty dollars.  But I suspect that it does what I've been able to glean from the various (though rather imprecise) popularizations.  What would have been interesting is to see what role suicides played in those death rates, but one study author notes that the information is absent from the official records.

If you care to read this post again (as if!), note how many errors the popularizations make.  The abstract tells us that the mental health indicators, with the exception of substance abuse, did not differ between those who conceived in the in vitro fertilization and those who did not.  Yet two of the popularizations I quote do state that they differed, and one states that they did so especially so for women.

One final comment:  I have never really thought about the possible correlation between having children and longevity, but had you asked me about it before I started waded in this mud puddle I'd have supposed that those without children might live longer.  That's because of anecdotal evidence from my own life and should be discounted.  Still, having children has real health risks for women, and a proper study of the relationship between having children and health should take those into account. 

It should also compare like with like.   If we wish to measure any impact having children has one one's health, then the pre-existing health states of the individuals in the study should be the same.  If they are not the same, the study tells us nothing much, because those with chronic conditions may simply be less likely to partner with someone and also less likely to have the physical health needed to conceive and, for women, to give birth.

On Guns, Victim Blaming and Conservative Interpretations Of Kasandra Perkins' Death

Content:  Violence

Sometimes watching Fox News is like being offered a glimpse from another reality altogether.  Here's Dana Perino suggesting, probably in the context of the Jovan Belcher case,  that women who are victims of violence should have made better decisions:


http://mediamatters.org/video/2012/12/05/perinos-advice-to-women-who-are-victims-of-viol/191702

There are people whose detectors are not well-tuned when it comes to danger in general.  But to suggest that better decisions would keep *someone* from becoming the victim of a violent crime is just bunkum/buncombe.  For one thing,  a person bent on committing violence would find another victim if the first choice "made the correct decision."  Then Perino could scold the second person as not having made good decisions.  And so it goes.

If we go down that route, it's the perpetrator of a violent act who should have made better decisions.  That would protect everyone!

This whole thing veers so close to victim-blaming that the two are identical twins.

Elsewhere at the  Daily Caller, Louise Trotter from the Independent Women's Forum (a gals' auxiliary to wingnuttery)  tells us that Kasandra Perkins died because she wasn't armed or that she may have died because she wasn't married to Jovan Belcher but just cohabited with him.  Given that Trotter's main point in the piece is to attack what she considers  a false causal argument:  that guns cause people to die, her own proposed causal chains are enjoyably suspect.

For instance,  several sources suggest that the Perkins-Belcher residence contained eight guns.  Unless they were locked away from Perkins, she did indeed have access to firearms.  Also, at least one study suggests that the presence of a gun in the home increases the likelihood of homicide rather than reverse (note that I haven't checked this study for accuracy). 

Then there's Trotter's argument that being  "healthily" married protects a woman from violence:

Imagine that the real reasons for this crime were conclusively shown to involve a complex interplay of factors including drug and alcohol abuse, domestic abuse, sexual competition and a lack of a healthy marriage relationship. In that case, is there any doubt that liberal elites would suddenly lose interest in the admissibility of causation? “Move along, folks, nothing to see here.”

I have never seen any studies which would have proven such a causality, and seriously suspect that the causality runs the other way:  One can't have a healthy relationship with a person who is bent on abusing you and even killing you.  Whether you are married or not.

Trotter's focus is on defending guns.  I don't think anyone believes that guns sneak away from a locked cabinet in the middle of the night and go out on a killing spree without any humans being involved in any of it.  So, using the old NRA argument, guns do not kill people but people kill people. 

What that saw ignores is the fact that guns make people extremely effective killers.  The killing happens almost instantaneously and there is no way of going back to the moment before that first shot, no time to reconsider.  Likewise, guns make killing many people in a row possible.  That would be extremely unlikely an outcome if a person tried to do it bare-handed or even equipped with a knife.

The high US murder rates are directly related to the availability of guns.  Alternative explanations would require Americans to be much more violent than otherwise similar people living elsewhere.  Which I don't believe.

Trotter's advice to women is to be armed.  She writes "Guns make women safer." 

But her opinion piece doesn't say anything about learning to handle a gun, practicing shooting or role playing various forms of attack to make sure that one doesn't shoot an innocent bystander or someone who came to the door trick-or-treating.  The police trains a lot with guns and police officers still sometimes kill innocent bystanders.  IF guns were ever to keep women (or any other population group) safe a lot of real training would be required.

But if gun-carrying amounts to something akin to quasi-religion, such concerns are unimportant.

The Scent of A Woman. Science Thursday At Echidne's.

This is a tale of two studies.  The first, by Saul L. Miller and Jon K. Maner,  was published in 2010 and you may remember it.  Here's the abstract:

Adaptationist models of human mating provide a useful framework for identifying subtle, biologically based mechanisms influencing cross-gender social interaction. In line with this framework, the current studies examined the extent to which olfactory cues to female ovulation—scents of women at the peak of their reproductive fertility—influence endocrinological responses in men. Men in the current studies smelled T-shirts worn by women near ovulation or far from ovulation (Studies 1 and 2) or control T-shirts not worn by anyone (Study 2). Men exposed to the scent of an ovulating woman subsequently displayed higher levels of testosterone than did men exposed to the scent of a nonovulating woman or a control scent. Hence, olfactory cues signaling women’s levels of reproductive fertility were associated with specific endocrinological responses in men—responses that have been linked to sexual behavior and the initiation of romantic courtship.

Sniffing sweaty t-shirts worn by women near ovulation caused a higher testosterone response in men than sniffing either clean t-shirts worn by nobody or t-shirts worn by women not near ovulation, get it?  Testosterone is associated with sexual desire in both women and men, so the results suggest that men can smell ovulation, on some deeply unconscious level.

Now fast-forward to the present.  Another study, actually completed before the Miller-Maner study summarized above, didn't find any such relationship between men's testosterone and smelling the sweat of ovulating women.  From this recently published study, by  James R. Roney and Zachary L. Simmons:

Unlike Miller and Maner (2010), we did not find more positive testosterone
responses in men after exposure to ovulatory chemical stimuli than after exposure to
control stimuli. Importantly, our study was not an exact replication of the Miller and Maner
(2010) study, and so should not be construed as a direct replication failure. Nonetheless, the
discrepancy in findings raises important issues regarding which differences in methods may
have led to the distinct outcomes.

...

A second difference between the studies concerns the male participants’ knowledge
of the stimulus source. As explained in the Introduction, male participants in Miller and
Maner (2010) were explicitly told that they were smelling shirts worn by women, and this
knowledge may have triggered mental images that contributed to the observed hormonal
responses. In the present study, men appeared to be in a state of uncertainty regarding the
identity of the odor stimuli: men were not significantly more likely to report detection of
human odors in the experimental as opposed to the control condition, and participants
generally reported detection of nonhuman odors more often than detection of human odors.
Even in cases in which men reported detecting sweat or body odor, there was never any
reference to women’s scents in particular, such that there is little reason to think that the
male participants were visualizing women. Differential likelihood of having visualized
women thus stands as another possible explanation for the discrepant findings between the
two studies: perhaps chemoreception of ovulatory cues is by itself insufficient to trigger a
neuroendocrine response in human males, which may instead require additional stimuli,
such as visual images triggered by knowledge of the stimulus source.

The bolds are mine.


Get it?  The Roney-Simmons study found no increase in the testosterone levels of  men who smelled the sweat of a near-ovulation woman as opposed to just water. 

As the authors state, this is not an actual replication of the original Miller-Maner study, but it is better in at least some ways, and the most important one of those is that the study subjects were not primed by telling that what it is they are smelling is the body odors of women.  If the conclusions of the Miller-Maner study really are about some subtle biological cues women's sweat offers about how close those women are to ovulating, then the Roney-Simmons study basically finds those conclusions rejected.

Why am I writing about these two studies?  Because the popular media prioritizes the first type of studies.  I'm willing to bet you almost anything that this new study doesn't make Fox News change what it wrote about the earlier study:

Forget Perfume, Ovulation Is the Way to Attract Men, Study Says
Published February 15, 2010


Perfumes and scented lotions only go so far when it comes to attracting a man; the body does the rest, MyFox National reported Monday.

According to a study done by researchers at Florida State University, men are unconsciously attracted to the natural scent of a woman, even more so when the woman is ovulating, Discovery News reported.

This is what is wrong with the popularizations.  They don't popularize studies which have null findings or which disprove earlier, gender-clickable ones.  And of course all that about a perfume is utter rubbish.  The initial study had nothing to do with perfumes and could not make any kind of statement about their value in attracting men.

Because of those popularization biases, the general public gets a distorted view of what the studies actually find, and are practically never told about a study which has been found quite wrong.

 

On Mammograms

The background for this debate:

Last week The New England Journal of Medicine published a study with the potential to change both medical practice and public consciousness about mammograms.
Published on Thanksgiving Day, the research examined more than 30 years of United States health statistics to determine, through observation, if screening mammography has reduced breast cancer deaths. The researchers found that, as expected, the introduction of mammogram screening led to an increase in the number of breast cancers detected at an early stage. 

But importantly, the number of cancers diagnosed at the advanced stage was essentially unchanged. If mammograms were really finding deadly cancers sooner (as suggested by the rise in early detection), then cases of advanced cancer should have been reduced in kind. But that didn’t happen. In other words, the researchers concluded, mammograms didn’t work. 

This is a bold claim for an observational study. There are countless reasons why conclusions from such studies are commonly fraught with error. What if, for instance, the lion’s share of advanced cancers occurred among women without access to screening mammograms—a fact often not available in health statistics? Or what if mammography successfully prevented a major increase in advanced cancers, leaving the health statistics unchanged? 

Hippocrates, the father of medicine, called experience “delusive.” He recognized that uncontrolled observations may lead to faulty conclusions. For centuries the flawed logic of observational data seemed to validate bloodletting, an unhelpful and often harmful therapy. But most who were bled eventually improved—no thanks to the bloodletting—an observation that led medical authorities to believe in the practice. 

Fortunately, we have learned something about bad logic. Today we seek studies designed to neutralize illusions. By enrolling people in a study and assigning them randomly to treatments, for instance, groups tend to be evenly balanced in every way except one: the treatment. Controlled studies led to the discovery that bloodletting is harmful rather than helpful, and randomized trials of screening mammography would therefore be a worthy gold standard to answer once and for all the question of whether the test saves lives.
It may be surprising, therefore, to learn that numerous trials of mammography have indeed randomly assigned nearly 600,000 women to undergo either regular mammography screening or no screening. The results of more than a decade of follow-up on such studies, published more than 10 years ago, show that women in the mammogram group were just as likely to die as women in the no-mammogram group. The women having mammograms were, however, more likely to be treated for cancer and have surgeries like a mastectomy. (Some of the studies include trials from Norway, the Netherlands, Sweden, and this major review of the data.)

In other words, mammograms increased diagnoses and surgeries, but didn’t save lives—exactly what the researchers behind last week’s observational study concluded.

Those European trials and the recent observational study might not be enough to conclusively determine that mammograms don't do very much to cut back breast cancer mortality.  But what if they are correct?  What then?

These questions obviously matter.  They bring up agonizing arguments about women losing the one tool of secondary prevention (i.e. screening) they thought they had against breast cancer.  IF mammograms are of limited value in prolonging survival, what can women do instead?  Just wait for a lump in the breast tissue?

But they also suggest that  mammograms as a secondary prevention tool might never have done very much prevention, that the cancer survivors who thank an early mammogram and consequent early treatment for their survival may, in fact, have had one of the cancers which doesn't advance very rapidly or at all.

This is tricky ground, mostly because our understanding of the possible types of breast cancer is so limited.  Perhaps some types of tumors remain small and never spread much?  Perhaps some types of tumors might even disappear on their own?  Perhaps the most aggressive (and often lethal) cancers develop so very rapidly that a mammogram is of value only if it happens to be performed at the exactly right moment?

There is something distasteful about those arguments.  But on the opposite side, consider the potential distastefulness of spending vast amounts of money providing routine mammograms to all women above a certain age if mammograms, indeed, turn out not to have much value in reducing mortality rates.  Those funds could be used for developing alternative screening methods or better treatments for breast cancer.

Then consider the radiation risks from mammograms every year or two and the financial costs and medical risks from potentially unnecessary treatments those mammograms may cause.

Clearly, something better than hope or entrenched industry interests is necessary to justify routine mammograms.  What is needed are proper prospective randomized trials where women are randomly assigned to a group which will have regular mammograms and a group which is somehow kept from having them.  Ideally, the two groups would otherwise be as similar to each other as possible.  A follow-up of these groups for a few decades might give us decisive information about the value of mammograms.

But studies of that sort are an impossibility in most places.  Mammograms are widely available and the control group could not be ethically kept away from having them, too.   And I'm sure that many would find such a study unethical,  because it would keep one group of women away from what is regarded as an established part of breast cancer prevention.   (That's the snag, of course.  If we truly are not sure about the mortality-reducing effects of mammograms, then they probably shouldn't be part of the established prevention pattern.)

All this may be premature.   It could be that new, and better, studies find mammograms of greater value in reducing breast cancer mortality or it could be that better understanding of the etiology of the disease allows us to use mammograms more efficiently.  Some alternative way of diagnosing breast cancer early might be developed and make mammograms but a part of medical history.

Still, when I was writing those musings I felt that odd kind of discomfort.  Even wondering about the validity of mammograms makes me feel like a traitor, like someone who would abandon an orphan in a life-boat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, like a callous and mean-minded Echidne.  But then looking at the other side of the arguments makes me feel pretty miserable, too.

Yet what ultimately matters is whether mammograms work or not.  That should be distinguished from the general efficacy of various forms of medical screening.  Some, such as the PAP-smears for cervical cancer, are very effective and fairly low-cost. Recommendations about others, such as prostate cancer screening,  are now more qualified.  We may simply not have sufficient information on breast cancer to make the best recommendations about who should get mammograms and when.

Where does that leave us, as individuals?  Trying to muddle through the best we can, I guess, with the help of those health care professionals who base their advice on the most recent state of relevant knowledge.