Analyse af Paxton Smiths tale om abortrettigheder

The speech is a graduation speech about abortion held by Paxton Smith in June 2021 at a highschool in Dallas, Texas. In her speech she focuses on the Heartbeat Bill, which is a abortion restriction legislation. Her claim is that women should have free rights regarding abortion. The law gives the pregnant woman 6 weeks to decide whether or not they want to complete the pregnancy. Her ground is that 6 weeks is too little time, since a lot of women do not even realize the pregnancy within that time frame. Further she questions whether the women within such a short time can figure out whether they are emotionally, physically, and financially sufficiently stable to carry out a full-term pregnancy. Her warrant is that all people should have full control over their own body. It is dehumanizing to get the autonomy over our own body taken away.

As an entering strategy of her speech, Smiths starts putting full flare on her emotions. She degrades herself by telling the audience that she is not, “good at expressing... gratitude…”(ll. 1) and she gains sympathy by saying, “thank you”(ll. 2).

To seek support for the messages in her speech, Smith primarily uses pathos as she tries to elicit an emotional response from the audience by using a lot of emotional words such as, “war on my body” and, “peace” and sentences such as “So before they have a chance to decide if they are emotionally, physically and financially stable enough to carry out a full-term pregnancy, before they have the chance to decide if they can take on the responsibility of bringing another human being into the world, that decision is made for them by a stranger.” (ll. 14-17). With a weeping voice, Smith tries to gain pity among her audience, which leaves us with a sad feeling that something is terribly wrong, a nightmare that can hit all of us. She speaks in a way that makes us believe that unwanted pregnancy, without time to react, can hit us all, so her method definitely works! While she is almost crying, she exposes herself by showing so many emotions, that the majority of us will be affected, also because it is a subject we can all relate to. Through that method, she gains trust from the audience and when she has got our attention and trust, she tries to make us realize how big of a problem this is by telling us that we need to react before it is to late, “And without our input and without our consent, our control over that future has been stripped away from us” (ll. 20-21).