The Weird And Wonderful World of Sex Inequality. And How Robin Hanson Would Fix the Incel Problem.

Remember the economist Robin Hanson and his proposal that being raped is less harmful than being cuckolded, provided that the rape victim is first drugged and then will never know about rape? (1)

Hanson has now proposed a new and fascinating solution to the blue balls (2) of online incels, the "involuntarily celibate" men who gather together on sites where the sufferers not only comfort each other but also recommend revenge at the world in the form of mass violence and rapes, and who call women subhuman.  That new solution is the redistribution of sex!:

One might plausibly argue that those with much less access to sex suffer to a similar degree as those with low income, and might similarly hope to gain from organizing around this identity, to lobby for redistribution along this axis and to at least implicitly threaten violence if their demands are not met. As with income inequality, most folks concerned about sex inequality might explicitly reject violence as a method, at least for now, and yet still be encouraged privately when the possibility of violence helps move others to support their policies. 

(Sex could be directly redistributed, or cash might be redistributed in compensation.)

The Girl And The Dancing Bear. Or Echidne's Poetry Translation Hour

I haven't done these poetry hours for several years.  The song below is based on a 1976 poem by a Finnish poet Marja-Leena Mikkola.  The poem (which I only learned about yesterday) is so popular in Finland that it lent its name to a Finnish annual poetry award (Tanssiva Karhu).

The poet has stated that she'd prefer to leave the interpretation of the poem to the reader, but that it can certainly be seen in several ways: as a description of real love* and as an ode to the importance of art in dark and dismal times.

I have provided a rough** translation of the poem below but without any attempt at trying to make it rhyme.





When the girl stepped in the wide halls
of her father's house 
she did not know
what was heavy
and what was light.

Then she was taken to the fair
- without care she was, 
without a hat she was -
and there she saw a dancing bear
among the grimacing clowns

And all she had to do then
to know
what was heavy
and what was light,
was to look into the eyes of
the leaping bear.

She forgot her father and mother
she forgot her childhood
and she hid herself among
the traveling clowns.

From then on she walked
with the bear,
From then on she slept
by the bear,
she shared with the bear her bread,
the cold, the hunger and work.

And the bear, the bear danced
when the girl beat on a drum,
and just like the sun eats of the moon
she ate of the bear's heart.

The road ran on, the years passed,
and still the clowns  they were clowning,
and in the midst of the fire and smoke
cheerful music rang.

But the bear at last grew weak,
and it fell on its side,
and it never rose again 
but slowly spoke:

"O, a light we have carried
into these years
of iron and of wrath,
we bore the light to a dark era
while taken for clowns.

The one who walks
the circus road
so long and broad,
that one knows 
what is heavy
and what is light.

The one who rules my heart
must cut it in two with a knife,
for my only crime has been
my bottomless love for her."

Now the mandolins cracked
now the clowns grew quiet
The girl took a knife in her hand
and the spectators paled.


When red drops ran
from the lips of the bear,
it looked at the girl and
said these final words:

"My love for you was like
a trip which has arrived.
Now the drum of my heart is quiet.
O, take it into your hands." 


This tale is old,
and already covered by
the most voiceless dust.
The girl herself doesn't remember
and even she has been forgotten.

------
* Which I needed as an antidote after having read one economist's proposal about how to reduce the "sex inequality" problem in the United States which,  in his view quite understandably, results in threats of violence. The solution (which I will address later) would probably require some kind of force to be applied to women reluctant to part with all that sex they are hoarding or spending on Trump and other top alpha males only.

**  It's pretty bad.  I changed the word "market" to "circus" in one place because the connotations are different in English.  But I couldn't find a good translation for "ilveilijät".  It's roughly the same as clowns but more sinister, about making scary faces and so on.

Friday Thoughts, 4/27/2018: Kevin Williamson's Pregnancy, Trump's Latest Rant and Obligatory Veiling in Iran

1.  Kevin Williamson, the conservative writer who believes that abortion is first degree murder and deserves to be punished as such, is a gift that keeps on giving.

Kevin believes that a fertilized egg is a human being.  Suppose, just as a thought experiment, that someone violently attacks him and inserts a fertilized egg in his abdomen.  Suppose, also, that the necessary changes are made so that the fertilized egg can now use Kevin as its nutrition and as the place where it will grow to a much larger size, finally pushing its way out with considerable pain, discomfort and even the risk of death for Kevin.

Never mind that the whole process is traumatizing, never mind that the raped Kevin would be in pain and shock, never mind that others would be deciding about his life, his health and even about his possible death.   Kevin would not want an abortion, because it is murder.

Or might he change his mind?

I have no idea if Kevin has made such a thought experiment.  But even if he has done so, a thought experiment it would remain.  The questions he pontificates about will never touch his right of self-determination, because nobody can forcefully grow human beings inside him.  Yet I don't see the necessary humility in Kevin's writings, the kind which should be obvious to anyone who actually doesn't have skin in the game in that awful sense.

Perhaps our Kevin makes an exception to his abortion-is-murder rule for rape victims?  But that would be illogical.

2.  This video (about Trump phoning in to the conservative Fox and Friends show) must be great fun to watch from some other planet.  It's a snapshot of the mental state and emotional concerns of the most powerful man on earth:



3.  Many Iranian women have protested the obligatory veiling laws of the Iranian theocracy in the early months of 2018.  This opinion piece, published more than a month ago, clarifies some of the issues which are poorly covered in Western feminist writings.*

-------

* The reasons for that poor coverage are very complicated, but include the argument that those who share the genetic background of the colonizers of Middle Eastern countries shouldn't center their own views about gender equality, acting, perhaps, like ideological colonizers, but should give center stage to women who live in the colonized countries in defining what feminism means for them.  Given the colonizing and racist history, the advice is theoretically excellent. 

But in practice trying to follow it has serious negative side-effects: Women in very patriarchal cultures are not likely to get their voices heard, unless those voices agree with the patriarchal values.  So sometimes the overall effect is a certain type of selective silence among Western feminists.  The scant coverage of ISIS and its treatment of women (which is horrendous by any yardstick) is one example of that silence.

The Incel Sites As Breeding Ground For Terrorism

Elizabeth Barrett Browning begins her Sonnet 43 with this line:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

If we replace "love" with "hate" in that line we are well on the way to understanding the misogynist sites, because misogyny on those sites comes in all possible flavors.  So many, indeed, that journalists must occasionally explain to those  who are blissfully unaware of the existence of those sites what "incels" might want or what "Pickup Artists" think of women or what "the return of the kings" might mean.

On the Online Incel Movement

Rumors, as yet unverified by the Toronto police, suggest that the Toronto van killer may have acted out of misogyny.  This is based on a now-removed Facebook post, attributed to the killer:

Some argue that the post could be a 4chan hoax.  We shall see.  But even if it is not, understanding what the incels are and what they believe is both necessary and very unpleasant.  This Twitter thread gives the basic outlines of the hate movement.

And a hate movement it is.

For those of you who wish to know more about Elliot Rodger, "the Supreme Gentleman," I recommend my long post on him, written right after the multiple murders of innocents Rodger committed in Santa Barbara.

Trump's Choices: Pruitt and Pompeo

Trump's choices of people (the best people, the bigly people)  for his administration are always worth a laff riot or two.  Or would be, if we were watching this show from another planet with lots of nectar and manna and popcorn and beer.

Just consider what Scott Pruitt, the EPA administrator, may have been up to.  The New York Times published a long list of accusations a week ago, and they make charming reading even if some of them are not true.  To give you just one example:

Lawmakers have argued that the Morocco trip, during which Mr. Pruitt promoted natural gas exports, was inappropriate since the E.P.A. plays no formal role in overseeing gas exports. The trip cost about $40,000, according to agency records, with the flights alone costing $17,000.

Pruitt is the proverbial fox guarding the chicken coop. There's a report that he encouraged the National Mining Association to ask Trump to withdraw from the Paris climate change agreement.  Remember that the guy is supposed to guard our environment.  Then down a gallon or two of nectar or beer.  That's the way to survive this upside-down world.

For a second example of Trump's weird choices, take Mike Pompeo's nomination as the secretary of state.* 

I'd prefer we didn't take that choice, of course, given that the guy seems to  really dig Rapture** and that the secretary of state can actually increase the likelihood of Rapture coming, in this case by seeing the global politics as a holy war between extreme Islamism and, I assume, extreme Christianism.

Pruitt and Pompeo are good examples of the two important groups among the Republican politicians:  The Money Boyz and the Godbotherers.  Both get what they want.

------
* His nomination is out of committee because Rand Paul flipped his vote on that!  Had he not flipped, Pompeo would have been the first candidate for the secretary of state position who didn't get a favorable recommendation from the committee.   (This footnote has been corrected for an earlier error where I called Rand Paul Paul Ryan.  I always confuse the two names. My bad.)

** For those lucky enough not to know about the Rapture Christians, here's a nice and relaxed take on the history of the concept. 

You know that Rapture has taken place when you see piles of clothing lying on the ground and your fundamentalist neighbors have disappeared into heavens.  (I assume that you will not be among the Raptured if you read this blog.)

That's the time to steal all their belongings, for at the next stage you and I and all other sinners will be eradicated in a fiery storm of punishment from the loving fundamentalist Old Testament god who made all of us in his own image.

Once we have been incinerated, the Raptured will be returned to earth which will become a blissful eternal paradise.

It's that last bit which gives Rapture-believers the incentive to try to end the world now rather than later.

Weekend Reading, 4/20/18: Black Maternal And Infant Deaths, Capt. Tammie Jo Shults And Richard Cohen on Reverse Discrimination

1.  This is an excellent and upsetting article on the high black maternal and infant death rates in the United States.  The problem is not a new one, but not much seems to have been done about it.  Recent research has been able to rule out poverty, lack of access to prenatal care and different levels of pre-existing health problems as the only explanation that would matter.  Something else also matters, given that affluence, good access to prenatal care and high education levels do not seem to equalize the white and black maternal or infant death rates.

The first article I link to suggests that the combination of racism and sexism might be that missing explanation, both in the way black women have to live with both of those and in the way the health care system treats them*.

This is a problem we, as a country, must solve.

On Babies in the Senate And On Child Care Expertise

It can be enlightening to  read two or more random news stories one after the other.

Today, for instance, I first read the story about Senator Tammy Duckworth's infant daughter, Maile Pearl Bowlsbey, and the rules in the US Senate which until now have barred children from the Senate floor:

Short Posts 4/18/18: On Sean Hannity, James Comey and The End Of Online Privacy

These are "breaking the silence" posts.  Sometimes the political events of the day or of the week are like a smorgasbord with too much hard-to-digest food, and then I am like Buridan's ass:  I cannot choose what to write about but dither in silence.

1.  What to say about the journalistic ethics of Sean Hannity, the Fox News pundit, who has pontificated on the witch-hunt against Donald Trump* and against Trump's lawyer, Michael Cohen, when we learn that Hannity himself is Cohen's client?

I guess he has no journalistic ethics, because an ethical journalist would have recused himself from covering issues with such personal connections.

The American politics now resembles the fights between fans of different sports teams:  It doesn't matter what the facts are, it doesn't matter what bad things your side may have done; all what matters is to win at any cost, and your side is always right, by definition. 

Well, that's what I see from the right-wing.  Not so sure about what the left-wing is doing when they are not carrying out circular firing squads or practicing being invertebrates.

2. And then Comey and his book.  Comey the Saint, Comey the Satan, Comey the Pure, Perfect and Perfidious. 

I do not care for Mr. Comey, for reasons that Hecate describes very well here, and I am pretty sure that whether the original impetus came from the New York's office of Trump-loving FBI boyz or from somewhere else in the organization, an important subconscious bias against women in power fueled much of the Hillary-hunt.

Which, by the way, is still continuing.  Hillary must be put into prison.  Well, our Dear Leader tweets about the need to jail all sorts of private people.  That's how he uses the bully pulpit the presidency offers:  To attack his private enemies in bouts of narcissistic rage.

3.  Here's a missive from our dystopian future:  Facebook was/is planning to help people with a new initiative to combine medical data with Facebook data:

Facebook's pitch, according to two people who heard it and one who is familiar with the project, was to combine what a health system knows about its patients (such as: person has heart disease, is age 50, takes 2 medications and made 3 trips to the hospital this year) with what Facebook knows (such as: user is age 50, married with 3 kids, English isn't a primary language, actively engages with the community by sending a lot of messages).
The project would then figure out if this combined information could improve patient care, initially with a focus on cardiovascular health. For instance, if Facebook could determine that an elderly patient doesn't have many nearby close friends or much community support, the health system might decide to send over a nurse to check in after a major surgery.

 ...

Health policy experts say that this health initiative would be problematic if Facebook did not think through the privacy implications.
"Consumers wouldn't have assumed their data would be used in this way," said Aneesh Chopra, president of a health software company specializing in patient data called CareJourney and the former White House chief technology officer.
"If Facebook moves ahead (with its plans), I would be wary of efforts that repurpose user data without explicit consent."

I find this proposal equally hilarious and enraging.  Sure, we all know by now that what Facebook makes its money from is the private information users put online and the private information of other users they interact with.  But to sell that information to doctors and hospitals, especially without explicit consent?  And information which is aimed at one's friends and acquaintances, not at one's health care providers?

The example in the above quote is an inane one, by the way.  The health care professionals are supposed to ask patients preparing for surgery if they have someone at home or someone who can come in for a few nights, or if they need a visiting nurse. 

That is my experience, in any case.  To try to figure out something like that from Facebook posts is a total crapshoot, because people don't always tell the truth in social media.  As someone recently said, people put their best face forward to their friends in Facebook and their worst face forward to strangers on Twitter.

I also immediately thought of someone who might post a picture of a bacon breakfast on Facebook, a few weeks after heart surgery, and then the avenging health care angels would swoop upon him or her.

Finally, the system is supposed to be anonymized.  But depending on the particular medical conditions and particular geographic areas it can be possible to identify specific individuals from such data.

All this is spying if there is no consent.

It's also an interesting example of the way information about us, the users of the Internet, has become one of the major commodities that are traded online, without any of the money flowing into our pockets.  So who has the property rights to that information?

------

*  I have met witches, and you, Donald Trump, are not one.  For one thing, witches have a lot of training and knowledge. 

Besides, the real witch-hunts were arranged against people with very little social and no political power:  Old women without relatives who had land the neighbors wanted and so on.

Paul Ryan's Farewell

Paul Ryan is retiring*.  He is currently the Speaker of the House of Representatives, he is fairly young and he doesn't look ill**.  He states that he wants to spend more time with his family.   But that excuse is believed only of female politicians.

Why is he really retiring?  His party is in power everywhere, his party can do anything they wish, including ignoring democracy, and his party is now responsible for everything that happens.  Why wouldn't Ryan want to be one of the most powerful macho men in the universe?  Why wouldn't he want to create the kind of fundamentalist-capitalist paradise his people dream about, a mixture of the power of the almighty conservative god and the power of the almighty dollar?

Nobody is willing to say why he is really retiring, or at least taking a break,  at this point in time.  It could be that he needs to isolate himself from Donnie the Deranged for a year or two, before running again to take Donnie's throne.   He could watch from far the collapse of the Republican Party in the midterms and then get back in the saddle.

That explanation assumes something which may not be true:  That Trump is too deranged for a sufficient number of former Republicans who might therefore vote for a Democratic candidate even in safe red districts.

But the reverse explanation is equally possible:  He may have been told that he will not win another term because his voters have become so extremist that they are now holding arms or merging with the Alt Right.  Yes, perhaps the pretty extreme Paul Ryan is now not deranged enough for the new Trump Party.

The capitalist wing of the Republican Party and the fascist-religious wing of the Republican Party might be fighting for supremacy.  Ryan is the scion of the former, and other than as a source of all the funding,  the appeal of a party which works only for the one percent may be dying.  That appeal is replaced by something pretty frightening:  A party for Aryan men and the families they rule.

Okay.  That last paragraphs was courtesy of my own private nightmares.  But not knowing the exact reason why so many rats are leaving the sinking ship is worrisome.  Is it because the ship indeed is sinking?  Or is it because the current rat population is replaced by a more voracious and meaner population, driving away the old incumbents?

------

*  This post is entirely based on my own amateurish but divine opinions.  It's fun, for a change, to write something which does not involve an eternity of tedious research first.

**  On the other hand, he does look like a cute Mickey Mouse:

Spring Is In The Air

In the Northern hemisphere. 

Christina Hoff Sommers And Closing The Gender Wage Gap

Christina Hoff Sommers, a famous anti-feminist,  is a good environmentalist.  To honor the Equal Pay day (which was yesterday) she recycled an argument she made four years ago:

I know that this is an old argument, because I answered her then, in a three-post series.  You should really read all three posts in that series (because they are not bad), but the proper answer to the above tweet is in the last post where I discuss why her proposal would do very little to close the overall wage gap.

On Arrogance

It's a fun topic to think about, arrogance.  I can spot several different kinds of arrogance, but not a single one is the kind of arrogance I would be allowed. 

To see why, let's define arrogance.  One dictionary defines it as "an attitude of superiority manifested in an overbearing manner or in presumptuous claims or assumptions."  Note the adjectives "overbearing" and "presumptuous."  Hillary Clinton or Elizabeth Warren would be viewed in that light, even if their attitude of superiority was manifested because they, in fact, were superior in some specific field.

In general, the level at which women are regarded as arrogant is much, much lower than the level at which men are so regarded, and women are quickly viewed as presumptuous or overbearing, even if they are only giving information about their own actual qualifications*.  And that's why I'm not really allowed any arrogance.  That's also why I have to be Greek goddess to get the kind of adulation I deserve and need for survival (divines who are not worshipped evaporate).

So I'm not very experienced in successful arrogant utterances, but I can still spot when others are arrogant.  Our Dear Leader is extremely arrogant, the stable genius that he is, though the best approach to understanding him is to view his reactions as "narcissistic rage."  

Andrew Sullivan is an example of a writer whose arrogance exceeds the size of the Pacific Ocean.  Here's an example from one of his recent columns (on race and genetics!**) where he criticizes what he has decided to be the lefty/feminist view of evolution:

The Song of Kevin, Brave And Bold

Kevin Williamson, for those who are not addicted to American political bickering, is a very very conservative journalist.  He was recently hired, for ideological diversity reasons,  by the Atlantic Monthly magazine which has a mostly liberal readership.  And then a few weeks later he was fired by them.

Some parts of the story are inside baseball, of real interest to only those who work in the field.  Other parts not so much.

Williamson is known as a very good writer in the troll genre.  You can get a taste of his trollery here.  But what caused the Atlantic Monthly to part ways with him was his assertion that women who have had abortions should be executed for the pre-planned, callous and clinical murder of the weakest among us*.  Preferably by hanging.

Short Posts, 4/4/18: Fake News, Paraguayan Abortion Laws And Amazon Customer Reviews

1. A new study (not peer-reviewed or read by your august goddess,  so remember that) suggests that fake news turned quite a few voters away from Hillary Clinton:

The study from researchers at Ohio State University finds that fake news probably played a significant role in depressing Hillary Clinton's support on Election Day. The study, which has not been peer-reviewed but which may be the first look at how fake news affected voter choices, suggests that about 4 percent of President Barack Obama's 2012 supporters were dissuaded from voting for Clinton in 2016 by belief in fake news stories.

It has the usual chicken-and-egg problem, because those who disliked Clinton to begin with are more likely to believe negative fake news about her.

2.  In March, a fourteen-year-old rape victim died in Paraguay while giving birth. Paraguay has the kind of abortion laws American forced birthers want to have here.  This made my eyes tear up:

“It was very sudden. They attempted advanced resuscitation in intensive care, but we could not save her. Her body was not ready for a pregnancy,” Hernán Martínez, the director of the National Hospital of Itauguá, told local media.

Bolds are mine.  Others decided that she was to give birth, nevertheless.  First her rapist and then the people who made those abortion laws.  She was murdered, to all practical purposes.  You figure out the culprits.

3.  Certain types of Amazon customer reviews are fun to read.  These are about a pen intended for women.

Trump News, 4/3/18

1.  Our Dear Leader is going to send military troops to guard the Mexican border against migrants.  I'm certain-sure that Mexico has no problems with the idea of foreign troops massing at its border without a declaration of war.

2.  The Sinclair Broadcast Group, a Trump-adoring local news network, which will soon reach 70% of American households (mostly because all anti-trust enforcement has ended as the rich don't want it), has gone on full assault against the mainstream media as the purveyor of fake news. 

 The chairman of the group, David Smith, the son of the founder of the company and an extremely rich man,  says that all print media lack credibility.  All. Note that he is one of the handful of very rich men who actually run this country.

Watch John Oliver's take on the latest news about Sinclair news.  It's worth your time:



I have long suspected that the daily brainwashing by Fox News is one of the main reasons for the ever-increasing anger and hatred American conservatives feel.  Their grievances are coddled and justified every day on Faux, the news they are offered are very biased (in both the tilt of the coverage and what is not covered at all), and they get regular messages about those who don't share their political news as the real enemies of the country who are not really even quite human.  After a few years of that it's no wonder that the Fox audience lives in a different reality and believes in a totally different sets of "facts."*

So the Sinclair group is something to worry about, unless the idea of a dictatorial right-wing United States is what you truly prefer.

3.  The most powerful leader on this planet keeps using the Twitter to yell about his private grievances and to pick on his personal enemies.  He gets his information from Fox News, refuses to learn anything about anything (say, that erecting import tariffs will cause retaliation) and probably thinks of war as something that would make him look like an even bigger warlord, with a penis so large that he would need a wheelbarrow to cart it around.

That he spent Easter tweeting angrily about migrants might look very minor in that context.  But remember that in other countries the leaders would probably just wish their citizens a pleasant holiday and so on. 

That used to be the case here, too, but no longer.  This new president of the country can use his bully pulpit to bully people just because he gets a kick out of it. 

Extreme selfishness, crudeness and bigotry is something we now take for granted in a leader, though naturally not in any woman who strives to gain that position.  Women must be absolutely flawless in every single possible manner, and ambition (such as is shown by running for an office) is a terrible flaw in a woman.  It demonstrates selfishness. 

--------

*  We all need to make sure that we don't live in information bubbles, of course, and we all need to learn how to judge evidence, how to assess the reliability of someone purporting to give evidence and so on.  But the belief in the deep state, the Pizzagate, the Seth Rich debacle and the new scandal about QAnon are signs of something far worse than not knowing how to assess evidence.  Probably not caring at all if something is true or not.

Tucker Carlson: Patriarchy Is Gone

Tucker Carlson is my favorite Macho-Media-Man. He recently opined on the end of men in the United States:

TUCKER CARLSON (HOST): The patriarchy is gone, women are winning, men are failing.

It's a zero-sum game, babes!  Or a seesaw.  If women are rising, then men must be falling.  It's not possible that a society could be fair to everyone, I guess.

Carlson's long speech (which you can watch here) on the plight of American men lists several problems which hit men harder (1) than they hit women:

Men are more likely to die from drug overdoses and leave the labor force due to addiction, men are more likely to kill themselves and men are more likely to commit felonies and go to prison.  Boys are more likely to fail at school and men are now less than 50% of college students.

The Sighs of Silent Struggles. Or Echidne News.

The headline has enough hissing for a snake goddess blog and it's bad enough to please me now.

I have spent days and days on two very long posts which have responded to my attention by becoming knottier and twistier and harder.  It's disheartening to be so tired that you are not quite sure if your eyes have rolled across the room and if your fingers have worn down to stumps from typing and yet realize that you have nothing ready for posting.

And when you go to sleep the theories and evidence and difficult questions dance polka in your brain and stick their forked tongues out.

These are the silent struggles.  These are goddess-world problems.  Disappointing, of course, especially for my large and thirsty audience, but not life-altering.

Just kidding.

I have bread crumbs and cake crumbs (and yogurt, probably) under the keys in my computer keyboard.  They cause me to get multiple ffffs and tttts and colons.  Extensive cleaning has not fixed the problem.  Should I buy one of those little gadgets that is supposed to snap out the keys?

Any alternative to those?  A fork?

I have the Tactile Pro keyboard, because it's ergonomically the best I have found (better than the ergonomic keyboards for me), so the keys in theory come out.

Women's Jobs And Men's Jobs Affect The Gender Gap in Wages

Here's an old example about one of the many ways in which occupations can become segregated by sex:

Disney Rejection Letter to a Woman, 1938 pic.twitter.com/PLwosc5vzo

— History In Pictures (@HistoryInPix) March 30, 2018

I have written a piece about how economists have tried to explain why women would still, in 2018,  crowd into lower-paying female-dominated jobs. 

Reproductive No-Choice News

Kentucky's Republicans are passing new laws about abortion:

The Kentucky House of Representatives passed legislation on Tuesday to ban a common abortion procedure from the 11th week of pregnancy, in what would be one of the strictest abortion limits in the United States.
The bill, which was approved by the state Senate last week, will now go for approval to Governor Matt Bevin, a Republican who has described himself as "100 percent pro-life."
Officials at Bevin's office could not immediately be reached for comment.
The House voted 75-13 in favor of the measure. It previously passed a similar version of the measure but had to approve changes the Senate made. Both bodies are controlled by Republicans.

Mississippi Republicans also passed a new law restricting abortion:

Saying that he was “saving the unborn,” Gov. Phil Bryant of Mississippi signed into law on Monday a measure that would ban almost all abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Abortion rights supporters called it the earliest abortion ban in the country, and said it was an unconstitutional restriction that defied years of federal court precedent over the limits states may impose on abortion providers.

The only abortion clinic in the state quickly filed a complaint in federal court to block the law.

The bill, labeled the Gestational Age Act, was passed overwhelmingly by both chambers of the Republican-controlled State Legislature this month.

And in Poland the very conservative party in power is introducing further abortion restrictions:

Lawmakers from the governing Law and Justice party, who have previously tried to ban all abortions, are making a renewed push to outlaw them, even when the fetus is sure to die in infancy.

The government dropped the earlier bill after it set off nationwide protests in 2016. Lawmakers revised the legislation to make it less harsh, including dropping criminal penalties for women who have abortions, and the new version has once again stirred women in Poland to take to the streets.

Yes, Polish women have taken to the streets to protest the new proposal.  But the lawmakers will keep proposing more and more restrictions.  The process is similar in the States, too: the house is demolished plank by plank, window by window, and door by door.

As I have often written before, the existence of proper birth control and legal abortion is fundamental for women's equality with men: 

Someone must take care of children, over a very long span of years, someone must feed and clothe them.  But conservatives are not interested in solving those questions in some more egalitarian form or in subsidies for those who have children or in programs which help women to return to the labor force after staying out of it to take care of children.  Indeed, from the conservative angle the wombs are a socialized space while children, once born, are someone's private concern.