...Bias, Rhetorical Devices, and Argumentation Taylor Saul COM/220 December 2, 2012 Dr. Tonya Laliberte Bias, Rhetorical Devices, and Argumentation “The Morality of Birth Control” by Margaret Sanger (1921) Write a 350- to 500-word response to the following questions: * What are some examples of bias, fallacies, and specific rhetorical devices in the speech you selected? * How did the speaker address arguments and counterarguments? * Were the speaker’s arguments effective? Explain your answer. First off, the speaker sent out letters to those she knew would agree with her and, also, to those who opposed her. She wanted to get together a group of people, on both sides of the fence, and have a discussion within the town about the topic of birth control. She goes on to talk about how every advance that women have made, has been met with opposition. She talks about when women fought for higher education, it was said that they would become immoral and would lose their place in the sanctity of the home. The one place that she says where men and women were on equal ground, was in the church. Their stance was that every man and every woman should be given the opportunity of Birth Control. They believed that a woman should have the right over her own body, whether she shall be a mother or not. Their first step was to get the backing of the medical profession so that their laws may be changed. They wanted motherhood to be a choice, rather than one of chance. ...
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...I believe that Margaret Sanger should be awarded the Hero of the Year Award for many reasons. First of all, Sanger helped educate millions of women all over the country about sex, sexuality, and even anatomy which at the time was considered obscene. She encouraged young women all over the country and answered millions of letters sent by women asking questions about birth control, and lectured on the topic. She also wrote many books and started The Woman Rebel, a newspaper that advocates birth control. This provided crucial information to confused young women in need of help. On October 16, 1916, Margaret Sanger, her sister Ethel Byrne, and Fania Mindell opened the first birth control clinic in Brooklyn, New York. They distributed birth control,...
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...ongoing battle, even though women have the right to contraception, but many women don’t have access to because of certain state’s government have laws limiting that access to birth control. By the government controlling women’s access to birth control they are controlling the liberty for women. Birth control has been a very controversial topic and taboo since the classical period. Before one can grasp why and how birth control and the use of birth control can be controversial, one will need to understand what birth control is and the history. First, birth control should be viewed as a woman’s basic right that goes hand in hand with her first amendment right, and without any interference from the government. The all encompassing question is what is birth control? Birth control is a practice, material, or device by which sexual intercourse can be rendered incapable of producing a pregnancy (Walker 161). While birth control through the centuries had been practice by both men and women in an extensive variety of ways, but only in the past two centuries that birth control has become a big matter of public debate. At a point in time, even speaking and writing about birth control was not protected by our first amendment. The law that forbids any mere...
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...Planned Motherhood: Margaret Sanger and Her Fight for Birth Control Morgan Ledford History 1200 Tamia Haygood November 13, 2014 During the Progressive Era, the United States was changing and developing but social issues were often neglected. With the rise of factories and big business, populations in small compact areas were exceeding holding capacity and the quality of life was decreasing. Margaret Sanger, born in New York in 1876, knew from an early age the change that she wanted to make in America. Sanger desperately wished to rise in class and her current education level so she attended Claverack College after which she enrolled in a nursing program at White Plains Hospital. She worked as a visiting nurse in New York City in the 1910s until she began to challenge the Comstock Law and write and mail contraceptive information to women. Through creation of different committees, leagues and publications, Sanger was able to slowly push the idea of birth control into the public. In 1914, Margaret Sanger coined the term birth control and then printed it in the Woman Rebel journal. Sanger also opened up her own birth control clinic and fought for contraceptives until her death in 1966.1 Throughout the Progressive Era, Margaret Sanger started the foundation for the Birth Control Movement and actively advocated for the passage and approval of birth control in the United States. Women in the Progressive Era had only two choices, “passive and usually pleasure less submission...
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...Rhetorical Analysis of “The Morality of Birth Control” In the article “The Morality of Birth Control”, Margaret Sanger argued that birth control is a moral solution to unwanted pregnancies and everyone should be informed about it (559). She originally published these claims as a well-known speech. She had hoped to motivate people with positions of power to join her movement promoting birth control. This article was one of the first steps Sanger took to change society’s view about birth control. Although “The Morality of Birth Control” contains a lot of Margaret Sanger’s personal opinions, I agree with her claim and feel as though she made a persuasive argument. At the time that this speech was given, there was a lot of controversy over...
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...Margaret Sanger When I was in high school in Vietnam, I had been studying History class for four years. Vietnamese students study things in general, and the teachers always give us a lot of quizzes and tests without giving any specific study guides. However, learning history in America is totally different; it has given me more interesting, and truthful perspective about many event that have changed the world. Throughout this semester, I am interested in a lot of topic that my beautiful professor has been teaching me. Particularly, I have gained more insight about Margaret Sanger who is known as a birth control activist and sex educator. Personally, I am indeed impressive what Margaret Sanger had done. She is not only beautiful but also a warm hearted and strong woman. She went through struggles and sacrificed herself for women's rights. By having potential knowledge, she did all her best to show women that they have freedom of choosing whether or not they will be mothers an hoe many children they will have. Later, she opened a birth control clinic which led to arrested for scattering information about contraception. She also found American Birth Control League and became Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Besides that, she helped the women realized that they have more choices to protect themselves. She often gave speeches about contraception to prevent mortality in infants as well as their mothers. She also educated them how to prevent abortion. Sadly, she took herself...
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...Sheree Oats Oats 1 April 9, 2012 Dr. April Mcray LIT 2110 Angela Davis, the daughter of an automobile mechanic and a schoolteacher, was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on 26th January 1944. Davis was brought up in an all white neighborhood where segregation was seen in every part of her life. She learned at an early age about racism and the implications that came along with being black. Her high school and college years were filled with many accomplishments. In high school Davis got the opportunity to study at Elizabeth Irwin High School in New York City where she gained an interest in both socialist and communist philosophies. Davis's scholastic achievements earned her a scholarship to Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. After graduating she became joined the Black Panthers, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and Ron Karenga's US-Organization. In 1968 she became a member of the Communist Party. (Encyclopedia of World Biography) Angela Davis life took a tragic turn for the worse when she became a public figure for being on the Federal Bureau of Investigation "most wanted Oats 2 criminals" list. On August 7, 1970 Davis was tied to a murder of four individuals who had been gunned down in a Marin County Hall of Justice Courtroom. The guns used in the crime were registered in Davis’s name. According to Davis became only the third woman in...
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...from a man, it will die and pass out of the uterus during abnormal menstrual period. But if intercourse takes place and the ovum is fertilized, conception occurs. The woman becomes pregnant, and nine months later, a baby will be born. Now, on the occasion that the parents of the unborn child do not want to have a baby, the parents may decide to use abortion, which expels the fetus from the womb via drugs, either oral or through injection. But if a couple decides early in a relationship to ultimately avoid having an offspring, they may practice birth control or contraception. The first time birth control was introduced to history was in the 1900’s. Population had increased rapidly. Margaret Sanger, a nurse, believed that the poor needed to control the size of their families. In 1916, Sanger established the first birth control clinic and in 1917, founded the National Birth Control League. Although widespread use of birth control is visible throughout the world, particularly in Europe and the United States, where birth control methods are legally available, not everyone is in favor of contraception. The Roman Catholic Church forbids artificial methods of birth control, upholding the belief that sexual love in marriage should never be separated from the chance of conception. RESEARCH LITERATURE The Reproductive Health Bill has two goals: to promote responsible parenthood through the use of birth control methods, and to assure widespread access to medically-safe, legal, and quality...
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...not using birth control, but that is simply not true. That statement applies to a small amount of women, but not all women in general. She also uses fallacies and other rhetorical devices throughout her speech. She uses moral reasoning within her speech particularly when she used the phrase, “religious scruples” and when she refers to those who oppose birth control and refers to them as a “group who are diseased and feeble-minded”. Her use of words not only evokes emotion, but implies the need to take action. One way Sanger addresses arguments and counterarguments is when she brings up the point of the two sexes “mixing together.” She also brings up the point that the people who oppose birth control are the same people who were opposed to women working outside of the home or mingling with the opposite sex. But, Sanger also points out that these same people had no objections to women to women intermingling with men when they attend church. Sanger accomplishes in this counterargument the double standard that I put on women. She successfully shows in her counterargument that women were allowed certain freedoms, and seeing that women could handle those freedoms, they most certainly could handle the freedom to choose to practice...
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...Margaret Sanger, the founder of the first birth control clinic in the United States, was arrested in 1916. At this time, there was a law prohibiting the distribution of information regarding contraception. Unfortunately, with the new “sexual freedoms” that the Roaring Twenties exhibited for women, thousands of women were baring more children than they wanted, more frequently than they wanted. With limited to no access to women’s health clinics, childbirth left many women too ill and weak to work. Over 250,000 women wrote to Sanger seeking information and advice regarding how to prevent more unwanted pregnancies. With the opening of the first birth control clinic in 1916, and her tireless efforts to support other clinics across the country, Margaret Sanger began a movement advocating for women’s health rights. In the American Promise textbook, the authors explain how Sigmund Freud, an every-day household name, was promoting his ideas that, as sexual beings, we should be able to “seek pleasure without guilt.” These Freudian concepts led to Americans exploring several ways of experiencing pleasure. Many of these newfound “pleasures” led to the prohibition of alcohol, challenged gender boundaries, and the expansion of mass media and communications. This roaring outrage of pleasure in the 1920s became known as the “roaring twenties.” While flappers were known for challenging the traditional gender boundaries through their sexual freedom, there were thousands of women who suffered...
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...Connecticut’s anti-contraception statute was part of a national movement to criminalize birth control. The driving force behind that movement was Connecticut native Anthony Comstock, “a prominent anti-vice crusader who believed that anything remotely touching upon sex was obscene.” Bolger v. Youngs Drug Prods. Corp., 463 U.S. 60, 69 n.19 (1983). After moving to New York following his service in the Civil War, Comstock founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. This vigilante vice squad initially performed arrests and seized obscene materials, but eventually began lobbying for anti-obscenity legislation. By 1873, Comstock had successfully lobbied Congress to pass an anti-obscenity bill to suppress the trade and circulation of obscene literature and articles. The so-called “Comstock Act” made it illegal to use the United States Postal Service to sell or distribute “any drug or medicine, or any article whatever, for the prevention of conception, or for causing unlawful abortion.” See 42 Cong. Ch. 258, March 3, 1873, 17 Stat. 598. Soon thereafter, twenty-four states enacted their own “mini-Comstock Acts” to restrict the contraceptive trade on a state level. In Connecticut, circus impresario P.T. Barnum (by then a state senator from Bridgeport) took up the anti-obscenity torch. Barnum had become involved in politics during the lead up to the Civil War, loudly and repeatedly denouncing slavery. Following the Civil War, he took up the cause of the New England...
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...Margaret Sanger was born on September 14, 1879 in Corning, New York. Margaret was the sixth of eleven children in a Roman Catholic family. Her parents were both socialists and early activists in the women’s suffrage movement. She attended Claverack College and Hudson River Institute, but was forced to drop out due to her mother’s death. However in 1900 she went back to school at White Plains Hospital and Manhattan Eye and Ear Hospital. In 1902 she managed to obtain her nursing degree and soon after married an architect/socialist named William Sanger. They had three children together, Grant, and Stuart. However, their youngest child died at the age of four due to pneumonia. Her marriage to William fell through, however, and they divorced in...
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...My reformer was Margaret Sanger who was a birth control activist and sex educator. The reformer I chose to date is Jacob Riis. Jacob Riis was a muckracker who used photojournalism to expose the impoverished conditions of the lower class in New York City. Margaret Sanger advocated that access to birth control and proper sex education would markedly improve the lives of underpriveleged women. Sanger primarily focused on the effects that birth control would have on improving the lives of impoverished women and their children whereas Riis focused on all aspects of poverty and it's effect on the lower classes’ daily life. Sanger believed that if women could control the size of their families they would be able to better care for and provide for...
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...January 15th 2012 Com/220 Argumentation assignment The speech I chose to read instead of hear was “The morality of birth control” by Margaret Sanger (1921). I chose this speech because I have worked in the healthcare field for over 10 years now, this subject truly catches my attention. Its also the reason why for my final project I have chosen to speak about abortion and pro choice debates. After reading the article I picked up on bias’ right of the bat. The fact that women have been viewed as immoral for wanting to control the size of their families or to act as responsible adults. Margaret talks about how many different groups were invited to the conference that was held and everyone acted with dignity except one group. This group was the religious “church” going individuals. This group views birth control as a “sin” so to speak and think it’s against gods will. I can vouch for this personally. I recently took a new job almost three months ago with a very well known catholic organization. We have amazing benefits except they will not cover ANY form of contraception or fertility treatment. This means I have to pay out of pocket for my prescriptions of birth control. A choice I have chosen as a single/divorced mother of three. I don’t want to have any more children, but in their eyes I am being immoral. To me some of the fallacies or misconceptions with this issue that they are basically stating that religion and worship make a person moral. How can that be when...
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...sponges, and medicated tampons. Due to the easy access to these devices to the public, both countries created a bill to prohibit the distribution of contraceptives across state lines and through the mail. Before the use of birth control in America, many women had opted for abortions because they either had too many children to take care of or they were simply not ready to parents. In the early 19th century, abortions could be dangerous. Too many abortions often lead the woman’s death because the technology was not yet available to try and properly prevent internal hemorrhaging. In 1878, Aletta Jacobs established the first birth control clinic in Amsterdam. The first birth control clinic, in the United States, was opened in 1916 by Margaret Sanger and was located in Brooklyn, New York. The clinic opened by Margaret was later closed by the police and she was remanded to jail for thirty days because she was...
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