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Micah Curtis
Professor Collins
ENGL 1302
22 February 2016
The Era of Birth Control
Margaret Sanger was a strong advocate for the availability of birth control and was the
founder of Planned Parenthood. In 1925, she spoke at a birth control conference in New York.
The people at the conference would have agreed with what she was saying, which she mentions
in paragraph seven. Sanger believed the world could be a much better place to live if people were
more cautious of reproduction. Pathos, repetition, and faulty analogies in Margaret Sangers
speech, The Childrens Era, convince listeners of the importance of easily accessible birth
control as well as the negative effects of not having it.
Pathos is the most heavily relied on element in Sangers speech. Sanger wants the
audience to feel sympathy for the children who were born into poor or large families, and feel
anger toward the families who have children even though they cannot afford to have them. Her
use of pathos is done so well that she is able to dehumanize prospective, poor parents. She uses
phrases such as, reckless breeding to take away from the love of a family or relationship
and to portray parents as irresponsible if they have a child when she does not deem them fit. In
this address, she only talks about how horrible a childs life is when they are not born into a
decent family. Furthermore, Sanger blames all of peoples hardships on the family they were
born into. Her argument is incredibly black and white. She fails to bring up the happiness a
person can have in life, despite their upbringing, and only talks about their misery. By doing this,
she can make the audience forget that there can still be joy in a persons life. Because she only

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evokes negative opinions, she is able to persuade her audience of the positive benefits from
readily available birth control, and convince them that not having birth control harms society.
(Sanger par. 9)
The repetition of small, seemingly unimportant phrases is used in multiple paragraphs of
Sangers speech. While these phrases may seem insignificant, they strengthen her argument. In
the second paragraph the phrase, all our, is repeated five times, which starts a pattern that is
used throughout the rest of the essay. The majority of the phrases she chooses to repeat use
second person. The reason she does this is to address the audiences responsibility to the
children. She almost always includes herself in the group to note her own personal responsibility
in making the world a better place as well. She does not repeat the same phrase in more than one
paragraph in order to keep her audiences attention. The repetition makes her speech more
persuasive because the audience has her ideas continually drilled into their heads. The phrases
are simple and short enough that the listeners may not have even noticed how frequently Sanger
repeats things, so this subtle tool becomes very powerful. Though is seems implausible for a few
repeated words to be influential on a persons stance on birth control, Sanger is able to persuade
listeners that birth control can help society by doing that. (Sanger)
Sanger uses three faulty analogies in her speech. All three of them compare having a
child and a family to simple, everyday things such as a garden, a train station, and an
employment bureau. These comparisons are fallacies in her argument because Sanger over
simplifies the beginning of a life. Despite the fact that the comparisons are fallacies, they still
manage to improve her argument. Her decision to compare unborn children to ordinary things is
convincing because everyone in the audience can understand what she is talking about and see
the similarities between them. The analogy of a child and an employment bureau is the most

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notable because it is the longest of the three analogies, and this starts the section of her speech
where she is most overt about what she believes. This analogy begins in paragraph thirteen and
continues through paragraph fifteen. In this section, she lists possible questions a baby would ask
its future parents to decide if it wanted to be born similar to questions that would be asked by an
employer seeking new employees. This is an over simplification because there are many people
who have been born into supposedly bad families and have been successful. It is impossible to
tell if a person would make a good parent or not by asking a few questions. Having a child is
nothing like applying for a job. While this analogy does not make sense when thought about
more in depth, on the surface it creates a connection that most people in the audience could be
swayed by. If looked at superficially, Sanger can make the audience forget that there is much
more that goes into being a good parent than making sure a child is well-born. The faulty
analogies in this speech influence the audience by demonstrating what Sanger believes makes
people unfit parents. (Sanger par 15.)
The Childrens Era, is a relatively short speech, however it is full of persuasive
elements including pathos, repetition, and faulty analogies. The topic of birth control can be
extremely controversial and many people have strong opinions about it including Margaret
Sanger. She believes birth control should be available to anyone who wants it and it will solve
multiple issues in society. Her speech is successful in convincing people of the effects of having
available birth control.

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Works Cited
Sanger, Margaret. The Childrens Era. American Rhetoric. American Rhetoric, n.d. Web. 8
Feb. 2016.