Menjivar 1

Samuel Menjivar
Professor Collins
ENGL 1302
10 February 2016
Grand Central Station of Life
On March 30, 1925, Margaret Sanger provided a speech at the Sixth International
Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference to advise all women to think about the
lives of the unborn child. In her speech she emphasized pathos, a metaphor, and the
fallacy known as a hasty generalization to convey that having certain criteria to become a
parent worthy enough to care for someone who has not been born yet will create her
desired end goal of a Childrens Era.
Pathos in Margaret Sangers Childrens Era is an obvious occurrence because
she wants to connect with the women on the common ground of pregnancy and planned
parenthood. The topic she is presenting to her audience puts them at the forefront of it,
which is keeping women from trapping themselves by being pregnant. When she starts to
present her ideas for a Childrens Era she initiates her utilization of pathos by making
the audience curious as to why the Childrens Era has not happened yet, because she
questions why there has not been any progress to the common goal she wants her
audience to strive for to care about the future of a child that has yet to be born (par. 2).
She also makes her audience feel livid about the America that brings in, nameless
refugees many unwelcome, unwanted, unprepared for (par. 4). She does this by
referencing them as weeds in the garden of children that she aims to cultivate in alliance
with her audience (par. 3). The other emotion the audience feels comes from when she
claims, We have got to fight for the health and happiness of the Unborn Child (par. 11).
This instills guilt in her audience making them feel obligated to take what she said into

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consideration and whether or not they have done so for previous kids, and she anticipates
that her audience will do so for their future children if they have not already. She speaks
on how women are enslaved by unwilling motherhood making the audience have a sense
of being liberated if the ideas she presents are set forth to create the Childrens Era (par.
18).
This metaphor of a garden of children is used to illustrate an image of something
that is feasible, all it takes is a bit of nourishment and effort. She states, Before you can
cultivate a garden, you must know something about gardening (par. 3). This is a
metaphor claiming that before a person can have a baby or babies they have to know
what it takes to be a parent. In creating this metaphor, it makes her point of planned
parenthood extremely effective because how can anyone have a garden and not have an
adequate place to plant the flowers of choice. The planting of the seed itself correlates to
the mothers decision to have a baby or not. The metaphor continues when she begins to
speak about the weeds or in other words the unwanted children in the garden of children
(par. 3). The surplus of refugees entering the country exhaust many of the resources
available to those who deserve them, which makes having a child inefficient because
there is a lack of means to do so (par. 4). Having this helps emphasize her thoughts on
planned parenthood and testing people planning on having a baby to see whether or not
they are fit to care for a child, not only when it is born but while the mother is carrying
the baby as well. She also expresses, we should make it a law that children should be
brought into the world only when they are welcome (par. 16). This is like having soil
worthy enough to plant a flower in, which means that if they have these criteria it will

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establish a strong foundation for future children that the parents are being tested to see if
they can provide for them.
Her hasty generalization of reckless breeding includes looking, into the family
history of those who are feeble-minded; or behind the bars of jails and prison (par. 9). As
if fitting into one of those categories means that they were born in poor conditions, and
that is the reasons they are mentally ill or incarcerated. This hurts her position because it
makes it sound like if people were all born under ideal conditions that we would not have
asylums, prisons, or feeble-minded people. She thinks that since they were not planned
on, or the parents of any of those type of people were not tested to see if they were
adequate parents, that they are not bound to make a mistake sometime in their life. Even
if that was true it does not mean anybody is voided of being born mentally ill just because
their mother passed her test and she took perfect care of the child under the regulations
Margaret Sanger wants established to create the first ever Childrens Era.
Overall her speech was very consistent in trying to persuade her audience to take
a stand to free themselves from being enslaved due to unwilling motherhood, and the
pursuit of creating a, Civil Service examination for the Child-to-be in an effort to better
the life of a child who has yet to be born (par. 13). She makes her position clear in that if
those two things existed we would have the worlds first Childrens Era making the
future America stronger than ever. She also thinks that we would not have people in
prison or asylums because all the future children in the Childrens Era would have been
planned, in conjunction with their parents passing the required test in place.

Work Cited

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