Evaluation of News Magazine Stories

I just recently found out that online news magazines actually exist, but I guess that shouldn't surprise me as online newspapers are also a thing. The internet is an amazing place. In the following post, I pick apart two articles from two separate news magazines and talk about the argument and the characters involved in said argument in order to analyze the positions on the argument itself.

"Why Science Can't Say When a Baby's Life Begins"

• The debate highlighted in this article is when exactly a baby's life begins, and how it affects the debate on abortion. Scientists before modern technology believed that life began when the baby first kicked in the womb. With modern science, we can usually see the heartbeat of a fetus at about 20 weeks. But even with this discovery, different scientists will disagree on when a fetus's life begins. For example, if you asked a neurologist, he or she might say that life begins when the heart begins to beat. 

• The most sympathetic "character" in this particular news story is Dr. Diane Horvath-Cosper, an OB-GYN, who is quoted saying, "I have come to the conclusion that the pregnant woman gets to decide when it's a person." Because she is a doctor who specializes in babies and pregnancy, I believe that she is the most sympathetic character in this story. She has a background of knowledge in this particular field, and even though the science isn't completely clear, her voice is reasonable because of her background.

• Paul Ryan, who in this story is representative of the congressmen who believe that abortion should be outlawed completely, is the least sympathetic character in this story. Ryan's argument is that life begins at conception, but has no proof, as even scientists don't know precisely when life begins. This article presents him as unsympathetic, purely because of his lack of knowledge about the science of pregnancy.

"Why are We Paying Sales Tax on Tampons?"

• The argument in this article is why in 40 out of 50 of the United States, women have to pay tax on menstrual products, but not on food and other necessities like medicine. The main proponents of getting rid of the tax are Cosmopolitan magazine and Jennifer Weiss-Wolf, who started a petition to get legislators to write a bill to end this tax. California Assemblymembers, Cristina Garcia and Ling Ling Chang are proposing said bill to end the "tampon tax" in California to start with. Congressmen are against ending the tax because it is a source of revenue, and they argue that if they take the tax off of menstrual products they will have to remove it from other "non-essential" necessities, such as Band-Aids. 

• The sympathetic side of this argument is the women and legislators who are arguing against the tax. They point out in the article that removing the tax in California alone would save people with uteruses $20 million. This could be beneficial for women who have low income, as it would save them money on each purchase. The article also states that using these "unnecessary" hygiene products can actually prevent reproductive infection and reduce incidences of public humiliation. 

Depolo, Steven. "Money Hand Holding Bankroll Girls" 02/08/2011 via Flickr. Attribution license

• The unsympathetic side is the congressmen who believe that we should keep this tax due to the fact that these products are "unnecessary." Most of these congressmen, according to the article, are men, who do not believe that these products are necessary for day to day life. These congressmen only take into account the amount of revenue these products bring in and fail to consider the public humiliation and health issues that come from low-income women who are unable to afford menstrual products.