The abortion rate in the US was far lower pre-Roe. It went up 5x in the decade after it was nationally legalized.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_statistics_in_the_Uni...

Wrong because Roe v Wade was decided in 1973, the rate went from roughly 14 to 23 (a 64% increase).

Naive because as Jim said, the article clearly states the numbers are voluntarily given and therefore would not include illegal abortions. And the recording started in 1969, so it wouldn’t be surprising for it to take time before clinics even began reporting. In other words, abortions in states where it was legal probably didn’t DOUBLE between 1970 and 1971, but rather reporting of them improved.

It doesn't mean that fewer of them were doing it before it became legal. They were doing it and hiding it.

It's the same as when gay people finally started coming out of the closet, once the laws and stigmas against being gay were reduced. Now they could finally admit what they were doing all along, with less fear of being stigmatized, arrested, imprisoned, or killed.

That doesn’t stop this falsehood from being repeated and it is one of many points of intellectual dishonesty that characterize the anti abortion movement.

Assuming you brought this to the discussion in good faith I would encourage you to reflect on your information sources because one side of this debate has shown a willingness to lie, mislead, cheat, and commit violence in support of their ideology. Personally I have found that ideologies that behave like that do so consistently and will choose to mislead to get what they want. That is a helpful heuristic for guiding how I interpret their arguments and attempts to support them with data.

The full quoted sentence, emphasis mine:

"This is correct and illustrative of why the power centric version of Christianity in this country needs to be actively removed from all positions of influence."

They're not saying that all religion is bad. However, religions have their place, and it is not in positions of power. Historically, the religiously-motivated have used their power to enforce their brand of religious belief above others. All religion should be banned from government, period.

Do you think that religious people should be denied the right to vote or hold office? Because if you want "all religion should be banned from government, period," that's what you'll need to do. Otherwise, only actions can be controlled, not motivations.

> If that’s what it takes, so be it (regarding holding office, at least - voting is not something I would restrict in that way).

Shades of "you can vote for whoever you want to represent you, so long as they're a Communist who will govern according to the will of the party."

> This government is not supposed to let religion dictate policy.

I think you have a serious misunderstanding of the establishment clause.

I don't follow. Removing people from the pool of eligible candidates because they want this nation to be a theocracy is not quite the same. We don't keep murder criminalized because God said so (although that was undoubtedly the reason murder laws were first codified in human history), we keep it criminalized because we understand that murder removes the agency of another person to remain alive.

> I think you have a serious misunderstanding of the establishment clause.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof"

If the only justifiable reason for a policy is religious, then it is on the face of it prohibiting the free exercise of religion (as the result of that policy should be a personal decision consistent with each individual's religious belief or lack thereof).

The Court is likely to revisit several precedents derived from Roe v Wade. Many of these precedents will likely be sexual or marriage related in nature. Griswold v Connecticut (the right to buy and use contraceptives), Lawrence v Texas (the right to be private in consensual sexual activity between adults), Obergefell v Hodges (the right of same-sex couples to marry) have been explicitly mentioned by Justice Thomas as decisions that should be revisited. This means that in the future, there will likely be a case related to each of those that ends up making its way to the Court.

Taken broadly, this decision basically guts the right to privacy. I expect this to get really bad and cast a much wider net than anyone expects, before it's over with.

This is just incorrect. Before the 14th amendment the bill of rights did not apply to states.

>Also, the term "separation of church and state" did in fact start with the founders.

It started with a single founder not founders. Have you read Jefferson's letter? I would imagine you haven't if you think it meant a state couldn't have a state religion or that they couldn't push religious laws (not that abortion is strictly a religious thing).

>Who were mostly deists, not at all like today's Evangelical Christians.

Do you have a list? I am not sure that mostly is accurate. Episcopalianism (is that how you spell it?) was quite popular.

"This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding."

I forgot about that brief time before the civil war when states felt like they could pick and choose which parts of the Constitution applied to them. Why do you think it only applies to the bill of rights, though?

I find it darkly humorous that it took an amendment to the Constitution to really drive home that the Constitution actually applies to everyone in the US. That seems like a bit of circular logic, but at the point of a gun it worked.

Imagine if states could just choose that the second amendment did not apply to them today. Ha!

Quoting the Constitution is pointless since it doesn't prove anything. If the federal government has the authority to do something then it is the law of the land. What you are missing is that the Constitution only allows like 10 things (I made up 10, but it is close to that). Anything other than those 10 things were left to the states (10th amendment).

Barron v. Baltimore was a Supreme Court case (that was decided unanimously) that made it clear that the Bill of Rights did not apply to the States. After the 14th amendment (though not immediately) something called the Incorporation Doctrine became the mainstream opinion. This was the process of applying the amendments to the states which only could happened due to the 14th amendment.

Prior to the 14th amendment states could ban guns though several of states had similar provisions to the 2nd amendment in their constitutions. Assuming they either amended their state constitution or never had the right in their constitution they could ban guns.

That was the entire purpose of the the way the US was set up. The federal government has a basic setup mostly to ensure defense of the nation (and a few other things like weights and measures) and the States deal with everything else. If a state wanted to ban guns they could. If you wanted to own guns you could move to a state that allowed gun ownership.

The US was intended to be closer to 50 distinct countries than one nation with 50 administrative regions like we have today.