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beinglibertarian · 6 years
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Before You Go To University: Logic
Editor’s note: This is the first installment of a new Being Libertarian series curated to help anyone who is beginning their journey through university. As Jordan Peterson alludes to in many of his lectures, the university can help a person read great books, absorb great thought, and develop their unique human ability to speak, argue, and articulate. But often we face a situation where rather than being taught how to critically think, students are instead being shown one-sided arguments, or being told what to think. This series intends to prepare future and current students so that they can move forward confidently into their university experience, one that will open their minds and challenge their presuppositions armed with critical thought, logic and reason.
Part 1: Logic
Libertarians and conservatives are becoming increasingly disenfranchised with universities. We tend to be fiscally-prudent, and universities aren’t necessarily geared toward vocational training and as such it’s potentially a bad monetary investment. They’re further viewed as propaganda machines for leftist thought.
Logic and truth can trump propaganda and so we wish to begin this series by delving into how logic operates and further suggest that universities tend to offer excellent classes on logic and critical thinking and would highly recommend this being your first selection of classes.
Logic is the path to truth. It’s developing an exactness with arguments to know that we’ve arrived at the destination of truth. Computer programming works with logic because it can’t permit any ambiguity or false implications. It’s the most useful thing any human being can learn, because we have to think every single day of our lives and ensuring we aren’t drawing false conclusions in politics, religion, with a business proposal, with a customer service agent, with health advice, with a loved one’s suggestions, is paramount.
We can arrive at truth by what philosophers call an argument. This is not an angry exchange, it’s a series of statements that are supposed to lead to some higher truth. If you want to prove that your cell phone company has given you an incorrect charge, you have to give them an argument as to why this is so, some sort of proof or justification, and knowing that your justification necessarily implies the conclusion is the business of logic.
An argument can go wrong in one of two ways, either the structure is bad or the content is bad. A bridge can have a perfect design, but if the government decides to cut corners and use jelly rather than concrete, that is, if the content was poor, it will be useless. Conversely, a bridge can be made of diamonds, but if the design is poor and the bridge is disconnected, the bridge is useless.
1. Validity
Step one is to ensure the structure is valid:
If P then Q.
It is the case that P.
Therefore: Q.
This is a valid argument. It’s saying that if premise one and premise two are correct, the conclusion has to be true. It doesn’t care about political bias, religious or atheistic passions, the authority someone has in a field, someone’s ethics or upbringing, and certainly not a person’s feelings or capability of handling offense, logic is logic and none of these are relevant, the conclusion follows necessarily from the premises.
P and Q can stand for literally any sentence:
If it is raining then I will wear my coat.
It is the case that it is raining.
Therefore: I will wear my coat.
If I am from Toronto then I am from Canada.
It is the case that I am from Toronto.
Therefore: I am from Canada.
If I am a Greek god, then I drive a Honda.
It is the case that I am a Greek god.
Therefore: I drive a Honda.
These are all valid arguments. Their structure is good. The content might be terrible, perhaps it’s wrong to say that all Greek gods drive Hondas, but when someone says an argument is valid they’re only saying that if the premises are true, then the conclusion must be true; they aren’t committing to the premises being true.
A valid argument, first and foremost, means that the premises generate the conclusion. Most of us have an intuitive sense of how logic works, or when violations of it arise.
The most splendid example of this in recent memory was Jordan Peterson’s famous interview with Cathy Newman. She continually interpreted him to be saying things he wasn’t actually saying, and he continually had to point out why his premises didn’t generate the conclusions she was drawing. Her deductions were illogical.
Newman: “What’s in it for the woman?” (a question about Peterson’s call for men to take responsibility for their lives)
Peterson: “Well, what sort of partner do you want? Do you want an overgrown child or do you want someone to contend with that’s going to help you?”
Newman: “So you’re saying women have some sort of duty to help fix the crisis of masculinity?”
Nothing of what Peterson had said generates the conclusion that she drew. It could be the case that Peterson believes this, her conclusion may or may not be correct, but the reason why she drew it is incorrect.
There are other examples to consider:
If P then Q
It is not the case that P
Therefore: It is not the case that Q
This would be an example of an invalid argument.
If I am from Toronto then I am from Canada.
It is not the case that I am from Toronto.
Therefore: It is not the case that I am from Canada.
This is clearly false. I could be from another part of Canada. Yet, if some ethical, religious, political passion is brought into the equation, some people might find an argument that takes this form to be a good argument and fall prey to propaganda.
This happens informally. Anytime a murder takes place with a gun there are those sure to get angry with the gun and claim, “If only they didn’t have a gun everyone would still be alive!” To put this in the terms of logic:
If person A didn’t own a gun, then person B would be alive. (If P then Q)
Person A does own a gun (Not P)
Therefore: Person B is dead.
This isn’t necessarily true; the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premises.
Another example:
If P then Q.
It is the case that Q.
Therefore, it is the case that P.
Consider the accusation that some Democrat is a communist:
If someone is a communist then they support socialized medicine.
It is the case that politician X supports socialized medicine.
Therefore, it is the case that politician X is a communist.
These premises might be entirely true, but they don’t generate the conclusion. When in office, Margaret Thatcher came to support Britain’s national health service and she was certainly not a communist, even though all communists support nationalized health service.
Another example:
If P then Q
It is not the case that Q
Therefore: It is not the case that P
This is a valid argument.
If I am from Toronto, then I am from Canada.
It is not the case that I am from Canada.
Therefore: It is not the case that I am from Toronto.
This is a valid conclusion. It might not be true even though the argument is valid – validity is only saying that if the premises are true then the conclusion follows.
2. Soundness
Not only should an argument be valid but it should also be sound. This is the next stage in logical arguments – our path to truth. This is the idea that not only is the structure of the argument valid, but the content is also true.
If I am a Greek god then I drive a Honda.
It is the case that I am a Greek god.
Therefore, it is the case that I drive a Honda.
This argument is valid and but it’s still remarkably awful (although, the conclusion might be true, I could drive a Honda, you can hold true beliefs and have terrible reasons for doing so).
If I am from Toronto then I am from Canada. It Is the case that I am from Toronto.
Therefore, it is the case that I live in Canada.
This argument is both valid and the conclusion is true. When teaching logic, I always ask my students if this means that the argument is sound.
The answer is no, further this is not even a sound argument. From this clue, you can logically deduce something about me. If it’s not a sound argument and both the conclusion is true while the structure is valid, then you know one of the premises has to be false. Given that the truth of premise one -Toronto is part of Canada, you can logically deduce I’m from somewhere else in Canada other than Toronto.
Provided someone hasn’t committed an egregious logical error in drawing conclusions, most political debates surround the truth of some premise, which generally requires evidential or scientific reasoning however, philosophy can weigh in on whether or not a premise is sound as well.
We do this by assuming a premise is true, and if we find a contradiction we know there is an error. A leftist might argue that equality of outcome is a good thing as it diminishes poverty. If this can be shown to have the logical implication of increasing poverty then a contradiction has been found and the initial assumption must therefore be false.
It’s never the case that we have P and Not P, as the truth of P implies the falsehood of Not P, and the truth of Not P, implies the falsehood of P. Logic might not be able to say whether it’s true or false that Dante wrote the Divine Comedy, history must do that, but logic can definitely say it’s false to claim that Dante both did and did not write the Divine Comedy.
3. Cogency
The third level of argumentation is when not only is the structure valid, and the premises are true, but it’s also the case that the premises are known to be true.
If the starting point of the argument is something the audience doesn’t agree with or is only potentially true, then the entire argument is worthless.
The abortion debate has two interesting premises. One side will contend that women should have the right to do what they want with their bodies. The other side will contend that it’s immoral to take a human life. The idea that women have the right to do what they want with their bodies, extending to an abortion, implies the unborn don’t have a right to do what they want with their bodies. The idea that it’s immoral to take a human life carries with it the notion that the unborn are human lives. I doubt either side would generally agree to the other’s premise and as a result, their arguments don’t go anywhere.
These are the three levels of argumentation. Validity, soundness, and cogency. If all three of these have been checked off, an argument must be agreed to. Logic is the most calloused of all fields.
Students recognizing the failures of logic is incredibly important. It will help them in all fields of study. It is the most effective safeguard against propaganda.
  The post Before You Go To University: Logic appeared first on Being Libertarian.
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bluewatsons · 4 years
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Ilana Yurkiewicz, Unnatural Selection, Science Progress (July 18, 2011)
Is Prenatal Testing A Triumph for Reproductive Freedom—or Brazen Discrimination?
In July 37 parents and supporters in New Zealand brought a complaint to the International Criminal Court accusing their state, and in particular the Minister of Health, of crimes against humanity. The Minister encourages prenatal screening and selective abortion of unborn babies diagnosed with Down syndrome, they wrote. “This is government funded social engineering and is also eugenics where only the perfect may be born.”
The case comes on the heels of a scientific discovery last December, when two research teams independently reported that they could reconstruct fetal DNA taken from the mother’s blood. Analyzing this DNA would allow testing for a range of genetic conditions, including one of the most common chromosomal disorders, Down syndrome, earlier in pregnancy than ever before. Additionally, the simple blood draw would evade the risk of miscarriage that comes with current methods of prenatal screening, including amniocentesis (which involves sticking a needle through the abdomen and into the uterus) and chorionic villus sampling (done either by a needle through the abdomen or by prodding a tube through the vagina and cervix). An early, noninvasive test could in theory become an option for all pregnant women, not just those who carry a high risk of genetic disease.
Due to the earlier testing methods, Down syndrome births decreased 11 percent between 1989 and 2006. Currently, over 80 percent of fetuses diagnosed with Down syndrome are aborted in the United States. These figures hit 91 to 93 percent in the United Kingdom and other parts of Europe. Learning a prenatal diagnosis at nine weeks, in contrast to the 10 to 12 weeks typical for chorionic villus sampling and 15 to 20 weeks for amniocentesis, could alleviate some of the physical and emotional burdens that accompany later abortions, causing these numbers to spike even higher.
A scroll through the online comments to the news stories reveals that the reaction in New Zealand was not unique. “Where do we draw the line?” one user asks. “Screen for autism? Screen for ADD? Abort those kids? How about just screen for anyone with an IQ <100? This notion of ‘designer babies’ is just appalling!” Another laments, “Welcome to the world of ‘Gattaca,’ designer babies and a new ‘master race.’” And yet another: “Anybody who aborts a child with a disability will never know what they are missing, and it is truly your loss, and the world’s loss. I weep for all those unborn babies who never will be able to share their gifts … an unspeakable tragedy.”
Hold that thought.
The Internet critics are right to make the point, as Marcy Darnovsky at Science Progress and many others have, that new developments in the laboratory necessitate profound moral reflection outside of it. But how much of these fears are justified? Is this really eugenics by abortion?
Like it or not, we are afforded a lot of liberty when it comes to reproductive decision-making. Parents may choose how to use their reproductive capacities, what kinds of children they want, and how to raise them according to their own standards of what they believe is best, free from government interference “unless the state could show compelling justification for the restriction,” writes bioethicist John Robertson. This freedom has a legal backing too, with the Supreme Court long protecting the rights of people to make their own decisions with regard to marriage, procreation, motherhood, family, and child rearing. If it’s “designer babies” we are worried about, we are already there. Women can now seek egg donors with criteria as specific as ethnicity and minimum height and SAT scores. Preimplantation genetic diagnosis involves screening for genetic blemishes in embryos created through in vitro fertilization and cherry-picking only the healthy ones to implant.
There is also the freedom not to have kids at all. Regardless of one’s personal opinion on the matter, abortion is legally permitted in this country. Moreover, a woman does not have to disclose her reasons for that choice. If we say yes to abortion for no reason at all, it seems illogical to forbid it for a well-defined reason, such as genetic disease.
So what’s the problem? Answering that means figuring out whether prenatal genetic testing is categorically different—or different only in degree—from what is accepted and established.
Bioethicists have spilt a lot of ink doing just that, and many of their arguments have converged on a similar sentiment. We live in a society in which we nobly aim to promote acceptance of diverse groups. Genetic testing undermines that aim, the argument goes, for it sends an intrinsically offensive message that the lives of people with disabilities are less valuable. As bioethicist Adrienne Asch opined, “As with discrimination more generally, with prenatal diagnosis, a single trait stands in for the whole…. The test sends the message that there’s no need to find out about the rest.” More recently, the New Zealand claimants agree: “The screening programme… devalues children with Down syndrome and is offensive to parents.” Allowing or even encouraging selective abortion based on a single “undesirable” trait is discriminatory, and it should be condemned when directed toward a fetus just as it is when targeting those who have already been born.
Genetic counselors have apparently done little to ease this concern. Counselors and the disability community have a “tenuous relationship,” claims one recent article, in which counselors often hold more negative perspectives on disability than those who are directly affected. These attitudes influence how counselors communicate with patients about prenatal decisions, causing disabled people to feel judged in clinical settings. Adding to the shaky trust is the fact that the National Society of Genetic Counselors, which represents the profession in the United States, has publicly connected itself more with abortion service providers than with disease advocacy organizations.
Doctors are not sporting spotless images either. One analysis concluded that written materials about prenatal screening are often insufficient, and the limitations of testing are not adequately explained. The latter shortcoming is especially problematic in genetics, where testing is probabilistic by nature and thus demands a nuanced explanation to be accurate. Unfortunately, a whopping 45 percent of obstetric fellows say their training on how to deliver a prenatal diagnosis is “barely adequate” or “nonexistent.”
Still, the critique of discrimination relies on an assumption: an attitude toward a diagnosis in a fetus, particularly one’s own fetus, represents an attitude toward an existing person. And social science research shows this may not be true. One discerning study surveyed 197 pregnant women about their beliefs on testing for Down syndrome in their own fetuses along with their attitudes toward the Down syndrome community at large. While unfavorable attitudes toward people with Down syndrome did indeed correlate with the women’s intentions to screen, favorable attitudes toward people with Down syndrome could not predict whether screening would be used. That is, many women who expressed positive attitudes toward the Down syndrome community still wanted to test their own prospective children.
The authors explain this result by pointing to previous research showing that people often make clear mental distinctions between people with a disability who are already born and those yet to be born. As a result, it is perfectly compatible to respect those with Down syndrome while hoping to have a baby without it. One sociologist has dubbed this two-fold position “important to test, important to support.”
Which brings up another big flaw in the testing-is-discrimination rebuke: it puts extraordinary pressure on any given person. Who doesn’t want a healthy baby? A parent’s priority is cultivating the best possible life and opportunities for their children. Asking her to forgo valuable disease testing for the sake of expressing a socially appealing message is making a child into a sacrificial lamb. Some take this argument even farther, saying that prenatal disease testing is not just something parents should do, but rather an ethical obligation. It would be negligent not to screen for genetic diseases if the opportunity to do so existed.
A similar case can be made for nonmedical traits. Want to screen for height genes? For whatever reason, studies have shown that taller people in both genders reach more leadership positions and make more money—an extra $1,000 a year or so—even after factoring out experience and education. And who says it has to end there? We could then open ourselves to the really contentious issue of favoring males because of the regrettable realities of a sexist world. The bottom line being: You can hardly fault a parent for wanting to optimize her child’s social lot. Don’t hate the player; hate the game.
But that doesn’t render the original grievance invalid. Live in a world where everyone acts in his own best interest, and the result could be the so-called “tragedy of the commons” situation, where the group as a whole loses. A powerful example is the selective abortion of female fetuses in India and China, which has caused a noticeably skewed gender ratio leading to a surplus of bachelors unable to find brides. In societies that value marriage as a staple of social acceptance, officials fear an increase in crime by the new male “outcast” group, greater use of the sex industry, and even an increase in the kidnapping of women. Extreme cases like this demonstrate that it can’t be on the shoulders of individuals to do the right thing for society at large. It becomes the law’s responsibility to step in and regulate whatever it is that would damage things for all of us.
This clash in priorities, with the competing interests of parental freedom on one hand and our antipathy toward intolerance (with a worst case scenario of dangerous social ills) on the other, is where the debate often comes to a halt. Both are important values, and saying one overrides the other is a matter of personal inclination.
But maybe there’s a way around taking a blanket stance to support either side. It involves acknowledging that that not all traits are created equal—at least not for prenatal testing purposes. Screening is morally acceptable for some but not others. A clever idea for making that distinction comes from Sara Goering, who uses the values of philosopher John Rawls to distinguish between morally acceptable and objectionable forms of genetic engineering (actually manipulating a fetus’s genome to give it preferred traits, rather than simply testing for what is already there). Some traits are inherently good, she says, regardless of environment. Other traits are only deemed valuable because of subjective prejudices that vary based on your time and place in the world. She gives the examples of cystic fibrosis and Tay-Sachs disease as belonging to the first category and race, height, and sexual preference in the second. Using science to our benefit while rejecting discrimination would involve engineering only those qualities in the first group, she argues. Otherwise, we would be exacerbating arbitrary bias, making us complicit in an unjust system.
An obvious interpretation of Goering’s ideas with regard to testing is drawing the line between medical and nonmedical traits. Based on the unfortunate mental and physical confines of disease, good health can be seen as an objective way of having a better life. In contrast, tallness as better is a societal construct. There is no intrinsic benefit of being tall (maybe they can reach higher things; but they also are worse at escaping notice). Rather than yielding to these prejudices, we should be striving to rectify the existing injustices.
Of course, this is not a perfect science. There is bound to be enormous disagreement over objective versus subjective good. Just look at the dispute over deafness. While most people view hearing loss as a disability, there are those in deaf community who see it as a lifestyle that they want to share with their children.
Realistically, much of this theoretical handwringing may prove moot. Are our prejudices so overpowering that we’d pick abortion over a child with the “wrong” height or eye color? Some people would undoubtedly favor testing without even considering abortion, but rather to prepare better for the baby. Others would opt not to know at all. Characterizing these preferences would require further empirical investigations, and there would surely be very different considerations in societies where biases are more engrained. But intuitively, at least in the United States, it is hard to picture large masses of people opting for prenatal testing of traits like eye color as the deciding factor for whether their child should be born.
This is a passionate issue. People have begun to speak out, whether through semianonymous Internet comments or an official complaint to the International Criminal Court. The concerns are legitimate. Detractors do not need “what if?” slippery slope arguments, often accompanied by references to science fiction, to vindicate their objections. They also do not need emotionally charged analogies to heinous past crimes of eugenics to grant them credibility. There are issues in science that have become so entwined with politics—where people split along predictable party lines, and a presumed clash of values automatically demonizes any opposing view—that open discourse is vetoed before it can begin. Making moral headway in prenatal testing requires that it doesn’t join those ranks.
There is something to be said for following our moral intuitions. There is even more to be said for a rational analysis of their validity, for an informed and respectful exchange of ideas.
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devinsena · 5 years
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Actually Vox, The Right’s Criticism of Roe v. Wade IS Valid
Earlier this year, Vox published an article titled “6 myths about Roe v. Wade, debunked,” where they attempted to invalidate the Right’s most common arguments about abortion.
Instead of discussing the valid criticisms against the decision of Roe v. Wade, however, Vox proceeded to bash the position of all pro-life conservatives and anyone who argues against the constitutional validity of Roe.
Throughout the entire piece, the author makes six (unsuccessful) attempts to derail the Right’s arguments against Roe as established law, claiming that “most of the criticism is dead wrong.”
1. It is not true that Roe is not rooted in well-established constitutional principles.
Besides the strange double-negative throwing readers off, Vox purposely misleads those who do not know their constitutional history. To a degree, Roe v. Wade is based off of a legal precedent from Griswold v. Connecticut, which established the right to marital privacy in 1965. Because of Griswold, the Court was able to claim the right of privacy included abortion, thus striking down any law which criminalized abortion. However, the decision in Griswold was not as clear-cut as may seem. In order for the Court to justify their decision, they drew from the First, Third, Fourth, and Ninth Amendments, claiming there was a “penumbra” in the Bill of Rights that allowed for sexual privacy. While technically it is true that Roe v. Wade’s decision was based on a legal precedent, to say it is well-established is clearly false. The right to sexual privacy is nowhere in the Constitution and the justices who established it had to stretch the Bill of Rights to make it fit in their agenda.
Additionally, Vox claims because Roe v. Wade has not yet been overturned, the decision must be rooted in firmly established constitutional principles. Looking back in history, we know for a fact this is not true. In 1857, the Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford that slaves were not American citizens. The decision was not overturned until the 1890s, when the Court ruled the Fourteenth Amendment extended to states, not just the federal government. Just because the Supreme Court ruled a certain way does not mean the decision is firmly established in the Constitution or that it is fixed law--Supreme Court decisions have been and will continue to be overturned.
2. Roe does not formally forbid virtually all state regulation of abortion.
Originally, in Roe v. Wade, states could not prevent a woman from obtaining an abortion in the first trimester, but could regulate it in the second and third trimesters. While it is true Roe gave states room to regulate abortion in the later two trimesters, the Court invalidated 50 state laws which sought to regulate abortion. One such case was Bellotti v. Baird in 1976, which overturned a Massachusetts law requiring parental consent for minors wanting an abortion. States were further restricted on what regulations they could pass after the undue burden doctrine was established in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. It was because of the precedent set by Casey that the Court could overturn any state law they felt was too restrictive on the access of abortion.
According to this Vox author, the regulation of abortion is wildly upheld by the Supreme Court and the doctrine of “undue burden” is loosely applied. However, this is clearly not the case. Through the doctrine of undue burden, the large majority of state regulations which were litigated have been invalidated. While the author says the Court has “struck down only one regulation under Casey from 1992 to 2016,” he provides no evidence to support this claim. While there have been very few cases brought to court in recent years regarding abortion, multiple courts--not just the Supreme Court--have struck down multiple pieces of state legislation, citing the laws caused an undue burden. Among others, some cases include Stenberg v. Carhart I (2000), Stuart v. Huff (2011), Isaacson v. Horne (2013), Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt (2016), and Whole Woman’s Health v. Paxton (2017).
3. But abortion is much more tightly regulated in France!
I am not exactly sure what this has to do with the argument Vox is presenting, since we are solely talking about abortion in the United States. The fact France has more restrictions on abortions has no impact on abortion here, since they are a sovereign state just like the United States. Regardless, we should be more like France and implement more restrictions on abortion. Instead of claiming Roe is constitutional, Vox makes this point for us, showing that abortion should be more restricted than it actually is.
4. Roe’s protections aren’t primarily about the gestation point beyond which the state may forbid abortion.
This is flat-out a lie. While is is true Roe’s decision allowed states to completely ban abortion in the third trimester, the entire case was based on the gestation point of a pregnancy. The whole legal framework Roe created was broken into the three trimesters, where in the last two trimesters states could regulate abortion. To boil it down even further, Roe stated abortion could not be regulated in the first three months of the pregnancy, but states could regulate abortions in months 4-6 if it protected the health of the mother. Additionally, in months 6-9 states could legally ban all abortions. Casey’s decision did change how the regulation of abortion was broken down, instead basing it on the viability of the preborn child. Roe on the other hand, clearly broke down any and all regulation by trimester and gestation of the preborn child.
5. Overruling Roe is no big deal because public opinion will protect abortion.
While it is true various polls have found overwhelming support in maintaining legalized abortion, they are often misleading. In 2017, for example, Pew Research, found  approximately 7 out of 10 Americans oppose overturning Roe, while another poll by Pew Research found the majority of Americans do not know about the general facts of the case. In fact, only 44 percent  of people under the age of 30 even knew Roe dealt with abortion, compared to 62 percent of all adults. The argument the majority opinion will protect Roe and the right to legalized abortion is misleading, especially since only a small fraction of the population even know Roe v. Wade is connected to abortion.
Vox also claims pro-lifers say overturning Roe is no big deal, but it is in fact a big deal. We agree with Vox on this last point. Overturning Roe v. Wade and ending the mass murder of millions of babies every year would be a massive deal.
6. Overruling Roe won’t return the issue to the states.
Because abortion was up to the individual states before it was legalized in Roe, it is not that far of a reach to say abortion will revert back to the states to decide, assuming Roe is overturned. While both the Democratic and Republican Parties are increasingly supportive of abortion on a national level, as seen by the Senate voting to once again fund Planned Parenthood, it has very little to do with what happens regarding abortion on a state-level. Vox gives very little evidence to depict overturning Roe will not return the issue of abortion to the states. Instead, they make an emotional, illogical argument about how much safer abortions will be for women if it remains legalized. Much like the other claims the Left likes to make, common sense and facts say otherwise--abortion will most likely be up to individual states if legalized abortion ends.
source http://humandefense.com/actually-vox-the-rights-criticism-of-roe-v-wade-is-valid/
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