Teresa Arline
EN1320: Composition I_V2.0
Lincoln Schreiber
May 27, 2013
Rhetorical Analysis
The speech I selected is “The Children’s Era” by Margaret Sanger in March, 1925. I chose this speech because I am a mother and believe that children should have the right should have the right to grow up in a safe, healthy, and happy environment. In this speech she addresses the results of overpopulation and lack of birth control options and about preparing the best way we can for the health and happiness of the unborn child. The first real step towards the creation of a Children’s Era must lie in providing the conditions of healthy life for children not only before birth but before conception. She compares raising children to raising a garden. She states that if we want to make this world a garden for children, we must learn the lesson of a gardener and so far we have not been gardeners only a silly reception committee. She talks of all the nameless refugees arriving, many unwelcome, unprepared, and without baggage or passports. This is when our reception committee gets thrown in a panic of activity trying to make places for and caring for these refugees. She states that the human weed crop is spreading so fast in the struggle for existence that the committee becomes exhausted, inefficient, and cannot think of a way out of this problem. She believes the way out is to fight for the health and happiness of the unborn child. Her ideas are to free women from enslavers and unwilling motherhood and that prenatal care is most essential. Her life-long work and crusade was to improve not only the lives of children, but their mothers by providing alternatives to the horrors she had witnessed working in the slums of New York City. The impact of her work finished through the development of the birth control pill. Her legacy is a controversial one but unmistakably the words of a gifted speaker that hold tremendous
Cited: Sanger, Margaret. “The Children’s Era.” American Rhetoric. N.p., 2009, Web 3 Oct. 2010