Urban Renaissance Institute

Lawrence Solomon
Next City
June 21, 1996

Hillary, whom I see once or twice a year on her visits to her middle-class parents in Toronto, is very much like them, except that she is poor. “There’s nothing wrong with being poor,” she says, “apart from people who try to stigmatize you. What does being poor mean, anyway? We may have no money for restaurants, and no VCR, but does that mean we lead an impoverished life?”

Hillary, who works as a chambermaid in a hotel, wouldn’t mind earning more, but not if that means giving up her comfortable, simple life in one of British Columbia’s picture-book valleys, where she and her husband manage one backpacking trip abroad and all the books they can read on less than $12,000 a year.

Unlike Hillary, my old friend Brian and his parents are not middle class. A school dropout far brighter than most who stuck with it, Brian, like his father and grandfather, enjoys his beer and smokes. For as long as I have known him, he has lived from paycheque to paycheque, and though a loving father and faithful husband, he can’t manage money. One evening he called, babies crying in the background, to borrow $20. He had inadvertently drunk the milk money. Frantically, Brian picked the money up by cab, which ate up most of the loan. The penny-pinching plodder in me has never understood how Brian gets himself into these predicaments, but I do understand that he has a different value system, one that all but ensures that he will never be wealthy. Brian lives for the present, and he wouldn’t be Brian if he didn’t. He genuinely scoffs at people driven by making money, and wonders about the point of slaving for 40 years until retirement at 65, to get 10 or 15 years of leisure you’re too old to enjoy.

You don’t need to be poor to share Brian’s, or Hillary’s, views; I know rich people who, in the same mid-40s age group as Hillary, have retired to the countryside. And rich spendthrifts who live for the present, running through their inheritances. But when the rich are laid back, they’re likelier to be envied than stigmatized.

HILLARY AND BRIAN and millions of other canadians are all lumped together in our national poverty statistics. Having lived in poor neighborhoods for most of my life, in a family whose income often dipped below the neighborhood average, I bristle at the characterization of people without ready cash as some kind of sub-species called “The Poor.” Brian’s lapses notwithstanding, poor people are neither unable to look after themselves, nor members of the exploited masses. Poor people know what they like, just as everyone does, and they know what trade-offs they’re prepared to make to obtain it. While many are trapped by circumstances – severely handicapped people, people too old and frail to work, those with personality disorders, and some who have been dealt an especially bad hand – poor people discriminate between jobs they would enjoy and those they wouldn’t, mull over borrowing money for that vacation, weigh a trek to the supermarket against the pricier but handier convenience stores. Put another way, poor people value their time, as we all do. But the rest of us, feeling superior because we’re not poor, feel justified in criticizing poor people’s priorities. We wouldn’t think of telling a jet-setter to make himself useful, but his poor counterpart is readily branded a ne’er-do-well (for whom we once had harsh vagrancy laws, and now workfare) or a cycle-of-poverty victim (for whom we have no end of sympathy and government make-work programs).

MOST OF US, at some point in our lives, flirt with the poverty stats, which measure our welfare by the income of our households. Hillary would have been classed as a “child living in poverty” while her parents were scrimping to put her father through university. She would then have become “well off” for two decades as her parents became financially secure, and then “poor” for much of the next two decades after leaving home. Anyone who takes a year off work to travel, care for a loved one, study or just reflect on life while contemplating a change in direction can find himself catalogued on society’s lower rungs.

A recent U.S. survey sheds new light on poverty by measuring how much people spend instead of the amount they earn. It shows that the bottom fifth, people with incomes under $6,800, spend an average of $14,000. Many are not poor at all; they are living on their savings, selling assets, and otherwise financing a time of low income. Income-based statistics show a higher poverty rate in the 1990s than the 1960s. But poverty is instead measured by spending, the U.S. poverty rate of 31 per cent in 1949 falls to 13 per cent in 1965, and keeps falling steadily, to two per cent in 1989. These figures include cash welfare payments and other transfer programs, which raise many above poverty levels; they exclude non-cash government benefits such as public housing and Medicaid, which, if included, might have lowered the poverty rate further still.

The best measure of our wealth, however, is not how much we earn, or spend, but how much we have. A survey by the U.S. Federal Reserve Board shows remarkable progress between 1983 and 1989: White families increased their net worth by an average of 24 per cent (to $216,400), blacks by 35 per cent (to $48,600) and Hispanics by 54 per cent (to $49,200). On the whole, we are becoming better and better off, and rapidly so.

WHILE TRUE POVERTY levels have been plummeting, in part because of generous transfer payments, poverty has also become much more visible due to policies that have evicted some of society’s saddest souls, those with serious mental disorders, from our public institutions, and left them to fend for themselves on city streets. The abolition of vagrancy laws also fools us into thinking poverty has worsened, when many of today’s vagrants, in an earlier era, would simply have hung out elsewhere. Fooled, we strive to solve the illusory immediate problem of widespread poverty that doesn’t exist, while ignoring real and pressing ones that do.

Looking for the root cause of poverty in some ideological class war in which capitalists mysteriously hold the poor down, or in presumed systemic bigotry that prevents one group or another from prospering, deflects us from marshalling our efforts for the truly needy. Our society is just; for every door shut by a bigot to someone deserving, two will swing open. As Statistics Canada shows, the rich get poorer and the poor get richer all the time. In its recent study of the importance of family wealth to children’s success, 27- to 30-year-old sons were compared with each other to see where they stood on their own social ladder. Eighty per cent of the sons didn’t do as well (relative to their peers) as their dads had, when the dads were in the top 10 per cent of income earners, while 86 per cent of sons did better than dads who were in the bottom 10 per cent. The sons of middle-income earners were as likely to rise to the top of the charts as they were to fall to the bottom. The ability to manage money – a combination of desire and discipline – is the best predictor of whether someone will die wealthy. Many poor people have these money management skills, many rich don’t, a happenstance that creates great upward and downward mobility in a largely tolerant, largely open country such as Canada. Only our small prejudices refuse poor people their pride and dignity.

SINCE MY CHILDHOOD, possibly because I identified with biblical stories of Jews in captivity, possibly because of my own family’s struggles, I have always been interested in the plight of the poor and those unjustly treated. I supported civil rights causes, opposed the Vietnam War, and then found my voice working for an environmental group. But I was always struck by how my fellow travellers in the broad progressive movement (apart from those in the labor movement) tended to come from comfortable, even wealthy, homes, and how – by assuming poor people would want their middle-class values, once they saw the light – these reformers patronized poor people.

Perhaps their thinking has a place in class-ridden Britain. Possibly it has a place in the U.S., where racism has been systemic. Certainly racism helps explain the widespread poverty of Canada’s aboriginal peoples, whose property rights whites continue to violate to this day.

But most “poverty” is either temporary, or it reflects a personal inclination to live for the present rather than save for the future, or it is part of a “voluntary simplicity” trend that the Wall Street Journal recently found to be growing – a belief that making and spending less are rewarding in themselves, that simplicity keeps us in touch with the important things in life, the things we all know are free.

For most people, lifestyle choices dictate income levels, not the other way around. And although I don’t doubt that being rich is better than being poor, speaking from personal experience, being poor wasn’t all that bad. If it were, nuns wouldn’t take vows of poverty, artists wouldn’t starve in their garrets, Hillary would give up her valley and Brian his beer and smokes.

Discussion

• Edward McDonnell
• David Vallance
• John Baster, Sr.

, Toronto, responds: May 27, 1996

, Toronto, responds: June 12, 1996

, Kanata, Ontario, responds: September 26, 1996

Edward McDonnell, Toronto, responds: May 27, 1996

Mr. Solomon,

I have rarely encountered such a disingenuous publication as yours: its attempt to appear progressive and sensitive while actually championing and justifying the worst aspects of liberalism and capitalism is truly audacious. I salute your highly developed ability to craft propaganda, which may manage to sell the virtues of selfishness and the existence of illusory universal opportunity to those who didn’t really intend to buy them.

Your own attempts to use your experience as a Jew (“Since my childhood, possibly because I identified with biblical stories of Jews in capitivity. . .”) are pathetic and despicable. The lessons of the Jewish people actually teach us about the destructive ability of powerful elites to scapegoat and misrepresent the situation and nature of vulnerable groups in society, in much the same way as you’ve done with regard to the poor in your magazine’s summer edition.

The existence of poverty is not a matter of choice or some statistical misinterpretation. It has existed throughout history because of the ability of the few to justify to themselves their need for the much at the expense of the many, and the few’s ability to enforce this inequity on others. Your magazine represents the continuation of a long history of attempts to characterize inequity and exploitation as ethical and/or inevitable.

Your magazine offers neither a compassionate nor moral perspective, so show some integrity and drop the pretension.

David Vallance, Toronto, responds: June 12, 1996

Re: To have or have not

This is an important contribution to the subject of poverty. By pointing out that some poverty is a lifestyle choice and that the opportunity to exercise that choice is enhanced by many varieties of welfare payments, you have demonstrated that many of those programs are misguided transfers from people who want to some who don’t. When combined with Jeb Blount’s “Buddy, can you spare a loonie?” we learn that there is a fairly large population that does need help. If we could direct our efforts to the right category, we would all benefit.

The article doesn’t make the connection with the City. The question I would like you to discuss is, What should be the City’s role in looking after the people who need help and how do we avoid wasting money on those who don’t?

Part of the answer can be found in the item in your magazine, “What makes cities grow?,” and in the Harvard Business Review May-June 1995, “The competitive advantage of the inner city” by Michael E. Porter. Two quotations from the article summarize Mr. Porter’s point: “We must stop trying to cure the inner cities problems by perpetually increasing social investment and hoping economic activity will follow,” and “Our policies and programs have fallen into the trap of redistributing wealth. The real need – and the real opportunity – is to create wealth.”

As a last comment, the City of Toronto’s 1994 financial report shows that Transportation Environmental Services, and Planning and Development totaled $266.2 million dollars out of total spending of $826.7 million, or about 32 per cent of the City’s budget, which is only 27.5 per cent of total revenues collected in the City (the rest went to schools and Metro. Metro spent most of their share from the City on police and TTC). The potential savings to the taxpayer if all these items were totally eliminated is less than 9 per cent of their taxes. If realistically we could reduce the cost for these items by 30 per cent the savings would only be 3 per cent.

I suggest that the real savings lie not in garbage, or transportation etc., but in government itself. Based on the criteria in the item, “What makes cities grow?,” mentioned above, Toronto is a very high spending city, and in my opinion, despite all the accolades Toronto receives from internationally bodies, the City of Toronto is in serious decline. I also believe the decline can be halted and you have an important role to play.

John Baster, Sr., Kanata, Ontario, responds: September 26, 1996

As I read Lawrence Solomon’s pieces explaining how individual payments and tolls would relieve traffic congestion and street parking problems, I concluded he believes people’s ability to pay is based upon their efforts contributing to the well-being of society. The greater a person’s income the greater their integrity, prestige and contribution. Lesser incomes should be diverted from public thoroughfares to clear the way for more superior people. It might be noted that bankers are traditionally very successful in business, as are their shareholders. It might also be noted that banks produce little more than waste paper. Banking is an activity which reaps immense harvests of money while producing nothing. One might ask how bankers and their financial colleagues can be so much more superior than a person who clears plugged drains under a street.

There is a term “conservative pretension.” This term is defined in many ways depending on the financial status of the definer. However, one thing is certain: Pretension is based on money as an end in itself. Therein lies the weakness of civilized democracy. National objectives reduced to the accumulation of money by individuals, inevitably become uncivilized, as two world wars in living memory will attest.

Mr. Solomon’s piece “To have or have not” states: “Poverty is really a matter of choice.” I think not. Mr. Solomon for some reason considers a low income from unplugging drains less important than his own self-satisfied conservatism. In seeking a more worthy national objective based on personal responsibility, accomplishment in the interest of society, personal fulfilment and happiness, we might concentrate more on education. Some human values seem common to almost all cultures regardless of religion. Honesty, trust and respect for others are qualities admired everywhere. There is little doubt that poverty, lack of privilege, crowding and disease stem from ignorance. Ignorance breeds and feeds on itself. Money alone can’t solve this problem. Human brains are all about the same size with equal capacity for mental activity. Biologically no brain is superior to another. All Western societies have an abundance of educational facilities, schools are everywhere. It is probably necessary for students to study economics, business, physics and reading. Certainly reading. Mostly it is necessary that students should want to learn due to being immersed in a stimulating environment teeming with wholesome values common to all human beings. True education has no place for pretension, bigotry or prejudice. Requirements for formal study can only be academic prerequisites. Only the state can bear the financial cost of full civilized education. The state reaps a harvest of responsible informed citizens. All citizens are the state, regardless of income.

Cecily Ross
The Next City
June 21, 1996

Prenatal diagnosis has brought us to the brink of a brave new world

Discussion

THE PREGNANT WOMAN IS WIDE-EYED WITH BEWILDERMENT. Her husband stands behind her, his hands gripping the back of her chair, his face blank with amazement. Across a desk, their doctor faces them and announces: “The good news is, you are having a healthy baby girl. The bad news is, she’s a congenital liar.”

When I describe this cartoon from a recent issue of the New Yorker, my friends laugh. They get it. Though they may not be following developments closely, they know that medical science is making gigantic strides in genetic research. They know that these advances are raising complex ethical questions. They see the hopeless conundrum faced by the hapless cartoon couple. What on earth do prospective parents do with the knowledge they have just received? What good is it to know that your child will be a hopeless liar? The cartoon makes us laugh because, like all good jokes, it mixes hyperbole with an element of truth. Prenatal testing can, indeed, determine the sex of the fetus; and it can detect such congenital conditions as Down’s syndrome, Tay Sachs disease, Huntington’s chorea, cystic fibrosis and many others. Many of us are aware that scientists have already found genetic markers for alcoholism, breast cancer, obesity and Alzheimer’s disease, but the idea that we may soon be able to predict with certainty whether a child will be tall or greedy, pigeon-toed or shy, jug-eared or generous still seems far-fetched — as far-fetched as landing a man on the moon or splitting the atom must have once seemed.

The question is, once you know how to split the atom, what do you do with that knowledge? An earlier generation of politicians and scientists built the atomic bomb. How will our generation make use of the remarkable knowledge that genetic research is yielding? It is only a small leap from mapping the human gene to using that map to engineer human beings. Most of us are aware that the brave new world envisioned by the eugenics movement in the 1920s and 1930s culminated in the horrors of Hitler’s Germany. History has taught us well. Such a thing could never happen again. Or could it?

The dilemmas posed by the new genetic technologies are nowhere more agonizing than for prospective parents who are increasingly faced with a bewildering range of opportunities and choices as they contemplate doing what used to be the most natural thing in the world, and who may soon find themselves (you can laugh if you like, but this is no joke) having to decide what to do about that little liar before she is born.

The perils of prenatal diagnosis

LOUISE LEBLANC THOUGHT LONG AND HARD BEFORE deciding to conceive her third child. Four years ago, at age 39, she and her husband, Paul, already had two sons and two thriving, hectic careers. But the desire for one more baby, this one a girl, perhaps, won the day. So, sleepless nights and stretch marks notwithstanding, Louise and Paul started their new baby.

Because of her age, doctors urged Louise to undergo amniocentesis. They told her she had a 1-in-65 chance of having a baby with a genetic abnormality. (Her chances of having a Down’s syndrome baby were 1 in 129). The procedure, which is performed between the 15th and 18th week of pregnancy, uses a needle to withdraw a small amount of amniotic fluid surrounding the fetus and testing it for genetic abnormalities. Children with Down’s syndrome are mentally retarded, but the severity of the condition varies. A positive test result does not predict the degree of the disability. Indeed, only three per cent of Down’s syndrome babies are profoundly retarded. Their life expectancy is now 55; many live independent lives.

Because Paul is a devout Catholic, abortion was out of the question. The couple was also unwilling to accept the risk associated with amniocentesis — 1 in 200 women miscarry afterwards. Louise refused the test. “I have seen so many happy families with Down’s syndrome babies that I was prepared to take the chance,” she told me. But she was not prepared for the reaction of her medical advisors. The doctors, nurses and genetic counsellors were surprised, and then disapproving, of the couple’s decision. The doctors insisted she must have the test because they needed to know beforehand. Due to the high incidence of heart problems in Down’s syndrome babies, they would want a cardiac specialist on hand for the delivery. Still, she refused.

“I walked out of there and I cried for a week,” she says. “They made me feel irresponsible and inadequate.” Her quiet confidence that she was doing the right thing turned to doubt, anxiety and fear. When she read about a simple blood test that could predict fetal abnormalities, she immediately asked her physician about it. Though it is widely available today, Louise’s doctor had never heard of triple serum analysis. A blood test at the 16th week of pregnancy detects certain substances in the mother’s blood that may indicate Down’s syndrome, spina bifida (failure of the spinal column to close properly) or anencephaly (failure to develop a brain) in the fetus.

By now Louise was desperate for some kind of peace of mind about her baby’s health but was still unwilling to risk amniocentesis. When she heard that triple serum analysis was available at a medical research centre in Providence, Rhode Island, she sent them a blood sample. After learning that the result was negative, she sailed through the rest of her pregnancy without anxiety. On November 30, 1993, a healthy 8-pound-2-ounce Caitlin Louise was born. Louise’s story illustrates the mixed blessing of prenatal diagnosis. The new blood test allowed her to find out if her baby was healthy without going through a risky and invasive procedure. But the pressure she felt, both from her doctors and from her own conscience, to make sure she wasn’t bringing an imperfect child into the world, threatened to turn her pregnancy into a stew of uncertainty and dread. She faced what seemed like choices but were really imperatives created by the new technologies.

Ten years ago, when amniocentesis first came into widespread use as a diagnostic tool for Down’s syndrome and a variety of other congenital conditions, only women over 40 were tested. Women at that age have a higher risk of having a child with chromosomal abnormalities (a 40-year-old’s 1-in-65 chance increases to 1-in-19 for a 45-year-old). Young, otherwise healthy women were not offered amniocentesis because the risks of the procedure were not justified. Over the years, however, the age of routine testing has dropped to 35. A woman of that age has 1 chance in 180 of chromosomal abnormalities and 1 chance in 428 of having a baby with Down’s syndrome. Her chance of miscarriage following the test, remember, is 1 in 200. At 35, it is questionable whether amniocentesis is justified.

Today, amniocentesis, with its attendant risks and discomforts, is no longer necessary to screen large numbers of pregnant women for genetic anomalies. Triple serum screening, a simple blood test, is available to women of all ages. By measuring alpha-fetoproteins in the mother’s blood, it determines whether a woman faces a normal risk for her age group. Louise learned to her relief that, though she was 39, she actually had only a 1-in-2,600 chance of having a child with Down’s syndrome — the same as that of a 20-year-old. A much younger woman might, on the other hand, show a 1-in-65 chance. Triple serum screening allows all women to be screened for abnormalities, sparing those who test negative the rigors of amniocentesis.

On the surface, this sounds like very good news. But there is a down side. Last year, during her first pregnancy, 28-year-old Karen Doyle took the triple serum screening, though she had no reason to believe there was anything wrong with her baby, and she really hadn’t given any thought to what she would do if the results were positive. “It was just a blood test. My doctor told me I should have it but it was up to me.” To her dismay, the result was positive. Her doctor referred her to a genetic counsellor who said that, if the reading was accurate, she had 1 chance in 63 of having a baby with Down’s syndrome. The next step was amniocentesis. Despite the risk of miscarriage, Karen went ahead. Three agonizing weeks later, in the 21st week of her pregnancy, Karen learned to her relief that her baby was normal. Now pregnant with her second child, Karen must decide whether to have the maternal serum screening again. And while she remembers and resents the weeks of uncertainty and fear that prenatal testing brought her, she finds now that she cannot resist going through it again.

Karen was unprepared for the emotional and ethical turmoil that resulted from prenatal diagnosis. And she in no way understood the enormous implications of just another blood test. But the mass genetic screening of pregnant women is more than just another blood test. It is creating the imperative to produce perfect babies.

LOUISE HAS A THEORY ABOUT OUR SOCIETY’S DETERMINATION to detect and eliminate defective babies. She calls it the “Yuppie syndrome.” Today’s parents are better educated and more affluent than their parents. They have high expectations for themselves and their children, and they have what she calls “a control mentality.” They have plotted and scheduled their lives and careers, and they like things to work out as planned. Because of birth control, yuppie couples have also been able to plan their families and many have deferred childbearing into their mid- and late 30s. Their parents had five or six children, or more. Some were smart, some weren’t, some were beautiful, some weren’t, some lived and some died. Yuppies will likely have only one or two babies, and they are determined to leave nothing to chance.

Whether the prenatal testing industry has arisen in response to, or whether it created, this need for perfection is open to conjecture. But its efforts are having an effect. Studies show that the incidence of spina bifida is going down. And now that pregnant women of all ages are being screened for Down’s syndrome, it and most neural tube deficiencies may soon be all but eradicated. Is this the same as eradicating tuberculosis and polio? Or is it a form of genocide? And when we have the ability to test for obesity and dwarfism, then what?

Sometimes I think it is possible to know too much. My mother continued to smoke through five pregnancies. Each evening she and my father had a cocktail before dinner. She drank coffee, tried to count calories and get enough exercise. She was 40 when her last child was born. And she had five healthy babies. But each birth was a gamble, each one a miracle. Today’s expectant mothers dare not smoke or drink even in moderation. Caffeine is forbidden. All forms of anesthesia during labor and delivery are frowned upon, breast-feeding is mandatory. Pregnant women have been elevated — or reduced, depending on your point of view — to semisacred vessels dedicated to the continuation of the human race. And if anything goes wrong, they get the blame.

Twenty years ago, I, too, went through a test-free pregnancy. Ultrasound was used only in high-risk situations then. One of my greatest anticipations was wondering about the sex of my unborn children. The moment of the announcement, “It’s a girl,” is unforgettable. But fewer and fewer women go through it. It is becoming as archaic as an ancient fertility rite. Last year, during her first pregnancy, my youngest sister had to insist that the doctors not reveal the sex of her baby. She wanted it to be a surprise. By denying the mystery and the miracle of birth, by turning it into a process th

at can be manipulated and controlled, we are changing the way we see ourselves and our children.

We need to closely examine the ways in which these technologies affect our attitudes. Close to 100 per cent of women who have tested positive from amniocenteses for Down’s syndrome have abortions. Aborting fetuses with Down’s syndrome is widely sanctioned because Down’s syndrome babies are defective, they may suffer, their families suffer, society suffers. In our success-oriented, beauty-obsessed culture, the low intelligence and physical anomalies of Down’s syndrome lead us to assume that such an individual’s life is not worth living. And yet we are appalled that anyone would abort a fetus just because it is a girl. But the Chinese and Indians routinely do so. To Indians, a female child can be a lifelong burden; to be female in China is to risk abandonment or even murder; it is a life not worth living. The point is that the value we put on human life is socially and culturally conditioned. We may believe that we are doing the right thing, but are we?

GENETIC COUNSELLORS STRESS THAT PRENATAL DIAGNOSTIC (PND) tests are entirely voluntary. But a 1993 survey in the Western Journal of Medicine showed 75 per cent of women undergoing PND found it difficult to refuse testing, saying that even though they had not been pressured, they nevertheless felt “obligated” to go ahead. A 1994 poll conducted by Canada’s Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies showed that 16 per cent of Canadian physicians think it is socially irresponsible to have a child with a genetic disorder when prenatal screening is widely available, and 40 per cent think they, not the parents, should decide which fetal anomalies justify abortion. The commission’s 1995 poll showed that almost 40 per cent of Canada’s genetic specialists support testing women in their 40s who have a child of one sex and want to know the sex of the baby they are carrying.

PND has come to be equated with responsible parenting. How will a woman who has forgone testing and subsequently bears a child with a genetic condition be perceived by society? How will she see herself? She is likely to feel as though she has done something wrong in allowing such a child to be born. Many women, particularly those with a family history of serious diseases, benefit from prenatal testing, but for millions of healthy, happy expectant mothers, testing confronts them with dilemmas they may have no wish to face and yet no way to avoid.

Some critics of PND go so far as to suggest that in an era of declining birthrates, and a rising interest in midwives and home births, the medical community has economic incentives to create new needs and services. Certainly, a whole new industry is emerging around the science of genetics, and these new industrialists are here to stay as long as they can persuade women of childbearing age that something is wrong with them that needs to be fixed. Psychiatry has long been dining out on the dubious promise that we can all be happy and well adjusted. As long as geneticists hold out the possibility of the perfect child, we will follow where they lead.

Our society values and expects perfection, and technology and science hold out the promise of perfection. This situation has brought us to a familiar and crucial crossroads. Which path will we choose?

Eugenics then and now

THE TERM EUGENICS, DERIVED FROM THE GREEK WORD meaning “well-born,” was coined by Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, in 1833. Early eugenicists like Galton, who later helped found the English Eugenics Society, were dedicated to improving the human race through wise mating, either by encouraging “fit” individuals to produce offspring (positive eugenics) or by preventing “unfit” individuals from doing so (negative eugenics). Prominent and powerful people embraced eugenics. Playwright George Bernard Shaw wrote in 1905: “What we need is freedom for people who have never seen each other before and never intend to see one another again to produce children under certain definite public conditions, without loss of honour.” By the early part of the 20th century, the movement had spread to North America. A slim volume published in 1919, The Super Race: An American Problem by Scott Nearing at the University of Pennsylvania is dedicated to “the mothers and fathers of the super race.” Nearing called for arranged marriages of the best and brightest men and women. He dismissed Cupid’s work as that of “a bungler, whose mistakes and failures grimace from every page of our divorce court records,” and declared that “the perpetuation of a hereditary defect is infinitely worse than murder.” In 1924, Lewis Terman, an American who was one of the principal developers of IQ testing, cautioned that if current haphazard human mating continued, at the end of 200 years, 1,000 Harvard graduates would have only 56 descendants while 1,000 Italians would have multiplied to 100,000. In Canada, such prominent citizens as Saskatchewan’s Tommy Douglas and feminist Nellie McClung extolled the benefits of eugenics. As late as 1941, Julian Huxley, a noted biologist and the brother of Aldous Huxley, published an article in Harper’s Monthly entitled “The vital importance of eugenics.”

The Eugenics Record Office, an institution devoted to the study of eugenics, was established in 1904 in Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island with money from the Carnegie Institution, the Harriman railroad fortune and John D. Rockefeller. The first laws allowing for involuntary sterilization were enacted in 1907 in Indiana. By 1931, some 30 states had followed suit. In Canada, British Columbia and Alberta passed similar laws in the mid-1920s.

The early part of this century bore many similarities to today. Science and technology were transforming society. The rapidly changing world brought with it hopes for a utopian future as well as fears about rising crime rates and the breakdown of traditional institutions like the family and the Church. For the first time, science held out the possibility of mastery over an arbitrary and intransigent universe. Darwin’s theories stressed “fitness” as vital to the continuance of the human race, and it was widely believed in those days that most human defects were hereditary. Britain’s lunacy laws of the 1920s provided for the incarceration of the “feeble-minded,” a category loosely interpreted to include recent immigrants, drug addicts, drunkards and epileptics. And surgical techniques were developed that allowed sterilization of “lunatics and degenerates.” Eugenicists believed that poverty, criminal behavior, prostitution and other social problems were inherited.

North Americans’ enthusiasm for eugenics resulted in more than 20,000 involuntary sterilizations by 1935. Between 1909 and 1945, in California alone there were about 10,000, and in Alberta, close to 3,000. That province’s Sexual Sterilization Act was not repealed until 1972 and has recently been the subject of a much publicized lawsuit that resulted in one of its victims, Leilani Muir, receiving $500,000 in compensation. Her sterilization as a “mental defective” (she was in fact of normal intelligence) took place in 1959, but by and large the eugenics movement faded out in the 1940s as the horror of Hitler’s attempts to improve humanity began to sink in.

The juggernaut of molecular genetics and our preoccupation with producing perfect babies could be the slippery slope leading to designer baby boutiques or even genocide. And we need only look as far as Nazi Germany to be forewarned. The Holocaust in which six million Jews were killed was the culmination of 35 years of philosophical and scientific thought. Hitler did not invent “racial hygiene,” the German version of eugenics, he merely used it to his advantage. Indeed, by the time the National Socialists came to power in 1933, “racial hygiene” was a respected theory that had been widely taught since the mid-1920s in most German medical schools. Ridding the human race of undesirable elements was a health issue, in the same way that prenatal diagnosis (the selection and destruction of defective fetuses) is a health issue today. And racial hygiene provided an apparently innocuous cover for Hitler’s anti-Semitism and the horrors of the death camps.

Germany did not pass sterilization laws, however, until after Hitler came to power. They provided for the forcible sterilization of people who were feeble-minded, manic-depressive, insane, epileptic, blind, deaf or alcoholic, just as similar laws in the United States and Canada had been doing for more than a decade. Why then, did the German flirtation with genetic engineering result in such colossal human destruction? What prevented the Americans from rounding up blacks, immigrants and the poor and putting them all to death?

Ruth Hubbard, a biologist at Harvard University who has written extensively on the ethical dangers of prenatal diagnosis, argues that Germany was fertile ground for the Holocaust because of that country’s concept of Volk. Volk refers to the German people, not as individuals, but as a collective body. Defective and diseased people were seen as an infection or a cancer upon the body of the Volk. Hitler seized this culturally ingrained notion of racial purity and drove it to its hideous conclusion. In 1935, plans were formulated at a Nazi party congress for “lives that were not worth living.” Members urged the necessity of destroying “worthless” people and those who constitute “a foreign body in human society.” By 1939, 300,000 to 400,000 people had been sterilized in Germany. In that year, the euthanasia of inmates of mental hospitals started. The program began by identifying defective children three years old and under, who were then transferred from mental institutions to German hospitals where they were killed. The program was eventually expanded to include children over the age of three. By 1941, 70,000 inmates of German psychiatric hospitals had been killed, many at hospitals equipped with gas chambers. Patients not gassed were killed by a lethal injection. Many children were simply allowed to starve to death. Relatives were told that patients had died from natural causes and had been cremated. The confusions of wartime made it easier for the Nazis to carry out these killings; nevertheless, public complaints forced them to end the program in 1941.

A salient feature of racial hygiene are the twin processes of selection and eradication. Throughout the extermination of Jews, gypsies and mental defectives, decisions were made about who was worthless and who wasn’t. The worthless were killed. Selection and eradication (not by murder this time but by sterilization) were carried out by Alberta’s Eugenics Board as it ordered the involuntary sterilization of 2,822 people, among them, 14-year-old Leilani Muir, a young woman who spent the next 20 years going from doctor to doctor to see if someone could restore her ability to conceive and bear children. Selection and eradication are the processes which inform prenatal diagnosis. The echoes of infamy ring loud and clear. “Scientists are once more engaged in developing the means to decide which lives are worth living and who should not inhabit the world,” cautions Ruth Hubbard. They provide the tools, and expectant parents must make the decisions.

One factor that prevented the state of California, for instance, or Alberta’s Eugenics Board from wreaking far greater havoc than they did is the absence of the idea of Volk in the North American democratic tradition. Thankfully, a reverence for the sanctity of individual rights still holds sway in our culture. That and a healthy suspicion of elites, be they medical, scientific, political or intellectual. But the concept of Volk is not far-fetched at all, and the possibility that elites could rule again is very real.

The future

Lesch-Nyhan syndrome is a bizarre and horrible genetic disease. Affected children are mentally retarded and compulsively self-mutilating. They gnaw at and chew their lips and fingers to shreds. They must be constantly restrained to prevent injury. A recent story in the Boston Globe tells of a couple who gave birth to such a child. Both parents carried the recessive gene for Lesch-Nyhan syndrome and a 25 per cent chance that any child of theirs would have the disease. Although they wanted another child, they wanted to be certain it was normal. When amniocentesis showed that her next baby was affected, the woman aborted. Three more pregnancies resulted in miscarriages. She became pregnant again, tested positive for Lesch-Nyhan syndrome once more and had another abortion.

The couple then decided to try in vitro fertilization. DNA testing now makes it possible to detect genetic errors only three days after conception. The couple provided sperm and eggs, the researchers created several embryos, discarded the defective ones, implanted the healthy ones, and nine months later the woman gave birth to normal twins. This is truly a modern medical miracle for a couple with such a tragic genetic history. But the implications are scary. Right now, the technique known as pre-implantation genetic diagnosis is costly and arduous. But geneticists predict they will one day perform it without in vitro, detecting defects before the fertilized ovum has made its journey through the Fallopian tube, before it is even considered a fetus. The unpleasant necessity of abortion, perhaps the greatest obstacle to full-scale genetic engineering, would be eliminated, making it much easier to select and eradicate, select and eradicate. The pressure on young couples to ensure that they bring only perfect babies into the world would be enormous. And when genetic research provides the means to actually alter the genetic makeup of an embryo just days after conception, can designer babies be far behind?

We must be very certain that we understand the power inherent in the new reproductive technologies and acknowledge their capacity for evil as well as for good. Perhaps the ability to create customized human beings will bring with it the dawn of a brilliant new age in human history, a society where crime and poverty, greed and disease, even unhappiness are eradicated. Or perhaps it will be science’s ultimate Faustian pact.

---

Discussion

1. Dave Sutherland, Yellownife, responds: June 6, 1996
2. Sharon Meins  responds: August 8th, 1996

---

Dave Sutherland, Yellowknife, responds: June 6, 1996

Dear Sir:

Putting to serious doubt the value of eugenics for improving the human species is the fact that selective breeding has been practised for over a hundred years to produce faster thoroughbred race horses, yet the speed of horses has improved marginally compared to that of human runners who are the result of extremely haphazard breeding!

Would Cecily Ross care to explore a comparison between the German concept of “Volk” as a colletive body and “a people” as defined by the Parti Quebecois?

---

Sharon Meins responds: August 8, 1996

Thank you for your paper on prenatal testing. I appreciate hearing someone represent the viewpoint that some things are not intended to be within our control. Each life, truly a miracle in itself, is to be valued. I have been trying to have a baby for several years and recently have been undergoing fertility therapy. Through my experience, I am more convinced than I was ever before that life is more precious than most people appreciate. It baffles me that some can undergo the fertility treatments I am undergoing, then when they find out they are pregnant with triplets “selectively abort” one or two. Well, anyway, since the opinion you expressed seems to be in the minority in these perilous times, I thank you for expressing it so eloquently.

Jeb Blount
Next City
June 21, 1996

Who is on the streets and why

Discussion

OF ALL THE MANIFESTATIONS OF URBAN POVERTY, PANHANDLING IS the most visible and the most disturbing. It assaults us during that most ordinary activity — walking down the street. Panhandlers are there when we walk to the cinema, when we go to work, when we stroll in the park. They prey on our emotions and our pocketbooks. To spare a dime, or not spare it, that really is a question.

Hard-core panhandlers have always existed. And yet, despite our social safety net (or maybe because of it), there are more beggars on street corners as each year passes. Accurate numbers are hard to come by because of the difficulty of pinning down a population that is very mobile. Many shelters try to keep track by counting beds or meals. Estimates in Toronto, for instance, range from 5,000 to 30,000. But whatever the numbers, the proliferation of panhandlers is a problem impossible to ignore.

Most of us will never come to grips with the unease we feel as we step around a bundle of rags lying on a subway grate, or as we hurry past that outstretched hand. Are these people just bums? Or are they victims of an uncaring society? Why doesn’t he get a job? Why can’t she go home? The truth is that all the myths are true. Some of them are crazy, some are sick, some would rather beg than work, some can’t keep a job, some have homes, some don’t. The reasons people beg are as varied as the people on the street, but from my observations, today’s panhandlers fall into three broad categories: traditional derelicts, Huck Finns and the mentally ill.

Traditional derelicts

THERE’S A NEW BEGGAR ON THE CORNER NEAR MY HOUSE. He’s not a regular yet. He only appears on weekend mornings when the two wrinkled and bulbous-nosed gentlemen, who live above a local herbalist shop, have given up drunken appeals for change from their post by a doughnut shop. He is neatly but unfashionably dressed. While not young, he looks strong, and his groomed beard shows no trace of grey. His hands are clean. In short, he seems to embody everything homeless advocates talk about: a decent healthy man who has tragically fallen through the cracks.

I gave him a loonie one morning by the newspaper box, and I asked him about his troubles. He told me his story in a voice edged with shame. His name was Bob. He had lost his job. He was homeless and very very hungry. He hadn’t eaten in more than a day.

After a few “bless-yous,” a humble bow and a gentle pat on the arm, he shuffled off.

I bought my paper and watched him continue his begging. Twenty minutes later, he poured the money from his cup into his hand, counted the change, stuffed it in his pocket and disappeared down the street. In a few minutes he was back, walking tall with a paper bag under his arm. Another much more ragged beggar, who makes his money opening doors for customers at the local branch of the Bank of Nova Scotia, approached Bob and tapped him on the shoulder. The two men exchanged smiles and greetings, and Bob pulled out a bottle of cheap, Chinese cooking wine from his bag. Exchanging knowing glances, they crossed the street and walked on toward a nearby park.

It is impossible not to feel sorry for them, but is Bob really the victim of a cruel and uncaring society? He is willing to lie about food to buy cheap hooch. He has enough wits to obtain decent clothing, keep himself clean and buy enough food to use his street corner earnings for drink rather than a meal. In short, he’s a bum and is beyond help until he decides to help himself. None of this should stop us from helping people like Bob. But we must admit that his situation and that of others like him is not something that a generous welfare state can really solve.

Bob and the other men who panhandle around my neighborhood have been a common sight on the streets of North America for more than a century. Many actually have homes, receive welfare and have access to counselling programs. Many have been on the same street corners for years, through economic boom and bust. We know them by many names: bums, rubbies, hobos, winos, dope fiends and vagabonds.

In the early parts of this century, cities such as Chicago, Toronto and New York were home to tens of thousands of homeless and transient men who rode the rails in summer to seasonal jobs on farms, ranches, mines, lumber camps and construction projects and tried to get by on that income during the winter. When their seasonal grub stake was up or they were too old or sick for hard labor, they languished on street corners, shantytowns or in emergency shelters run by churches and other charitable groups.

But seasonal jobs in mining, farming and forestry have become mechanized, limiting the need for unskilled labor. Gone are the slow and steady freight trains making regular stops for water and coal that provided free transportation between open-air hobo jungles. The plight of these derelicts gave rise to such social reforms as unemployment insurance, old age pensions and general welfare. In the years of the Depression, the elderly were the poorest social cohort in the population, today that group is the best off. Our social safety net has managed for 50 years to keep people off the streets.

Now, for increasingly complex reasons, they are coming back. But today’s derelicts have fewer opportunities to pull themselves together and hit the road. As a result, many remain down and out year round because of the lack of seasonal manual work. New age temporary jobs in such areas as telemarketing require too much education, discipline and personal grooming for most street people. The modern hobo is equipped to do little beyond delivering flyers. Today’s street corner rubbie has fallen off the map completely. He has destroyed his life with drink, drugs and despair and is unable, or unwilling, to use what social services are available.

Most derelicts are lost causes. Our culture’s general optimism prevents us from saying it so bluntly, but we can’t escape the fact that there are people who are unwilling or unable to be helped. Like long-term prison inmates, they know no other life than their life on the streets and find it difficult to adjust to life elsewhere. Many of the homeless are not homeless at all. On Vancouver’s skid row, for instance, are several of Canada’s most stable postal codes. The people who arrive in the cheap rooming houses and hotels east of downtown tend to stay. Clannish, many share rooms, help each other out when in trouble and find a kind of community in adversity. The traditional derelict is actually fairly well served by government and private charities, which by and large keep them at least minimally fed, warm in the winter and within asking range of a bath, medical care and social assistance. Kind people provide them with change and donations of blankets and clothes.

And there is a kind of community on the street. Many, like Bob and the beggars in my neighborhood, beg together, or stand their companions a drink when the pickings are good or they have welfare money. Panhandling is their job, their way of life. Whatever we do with our social programs, they will probably always be there.

Huck Finns

THE MOST STARTLING THING ABOUT THE KIDS PANHANDLING FOR CHANGE on Bloor Street West in Toronto is their politeness. Despite their tough dress, leather jackets, spiked and rainbow-colored hair, pierced noses, ears and cheeks, they inspire no fear. Their pets are calm and rarely bark at anyone. Little more than children, they solicit change from passers-by with cheerful greetings and a ready smile. What are these apparently good-natured, albeit strange looking, kids doing on the streets? The answer might be summed up by the old standard: “How do you keep them down on the farm after they’ve seen Paris?”

Although many are fleeing abusive or dysfunctional family situations, freedom for an adolescent or young adult is a powerful drug, sometimes more important than financial security or even a warm bed. They can dress as they please, stay out as late as they want and take care of themselves. Once they are free of the nest, it is almost impossible to get a young person back in. Like Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, many refuse to return home or take a space in a government program even if it is offered. Freedom is their goal, and whatever the difficulties, begging on the street is a kind of freedom.

A generation ago, begging was against the law. Across Canada and in the United States, vagrancy laws gave police a strong stick to beat such young people with. This is one of the most misunderstood sides of the panhandling problem. We allow people to beg because prohibiting it goes against our long evolving concept of liberty. If freedom of speech means anything, it at least means allowing a person to ask for help in public. The same goes for freedom of movement and assembly. One reason we see more young people begging is because they are allowed to. Ensuring that they do not mature into full-blown derelicts, prostitutes and drug addicts won’t be accomplished without realizing the natural tendency of the young to rebel against all authority, including that of a government interested in helping them.

The mentally disturbed

THERE IS A MAN KNOWN AT TORONTO’S HOMELESS SHELTERS WHO IS constantly being hospitalized because he compulsively picks the skin off his arms. Doctors treat the man and release him, but there is no way to make him stop. The man is also severely diabetic but refuses to take his medicine because he claims the Queen has ordered him not to. Everyone who deals with him is frustrated. Shelters have to take care of him, even though this seven-foot-tall, disturbed and diabetic man has a penchant for breaking into shelter pantries and eating everything. Doctors have to treat his self-inflicted wounds, even though they know he will continue to hurt himself. Because of policies begun decades ago aimed at phasing out beds in mental institutions, there are thousands like him begging or wandering our streets. At Toronto’s Queen Street Mental Hospital alone, the number of beds has fallen from a high of around 1,500 in the mid-1950s to only 450 today. Whatever the benefits of these policies, an increase in insane people on the streets is an undeniable result. According to some estimates, between half and two-thirds of street people suffer from mental illness. The situation has come about in part because of the discovery of drugs that allow many former inmates of mental institutions to live beyond the walls that used to legally confine and to a large degree protect them from the cruelties of the world beyond. But the old asylums were often little more than hell’s waiting room. The new drugs raised the hope that otherwise incompetent individuals could live more normal lives. And many now do. But problems arise with those who do not or cannot take their medication. This is an extremely tricky issue. Legal and medical advances have benefited many people who have been unjustly committed to institutions, but it seems we have gone too far in the other direction.

THE PANHANDLERS WE ENCOUNTER AS WE WALK DOWN THE STREET ARE not the only faces of poverty in Canada, just the most visible. Because they are always on the move, because they are so young or because they are ill and insane, the long arms of our social safety net cannot always reach the people who have made the street their home. But perhaps taking the time to look carefully at their faces will cast a little light on their situation. When you see a panhandler, remember “There but for the grace of God go I.” And help them out if you can. Let that kid wash your windshield. Give the old bag lady a sweater you don’t need. Donate to a food bank. Charity isn’t purely a government affair, it’s a private affair too. By asking, our most unfortunate fellows are showing that they are willing to accept some help. By giving, we show that all is not lost.

---

<!–

Discussion

 

1. Barb Craig RN, responds: May 26, 1996

---

–>

Barb Craig, RN, responds: May 26, 1996

 

Dear Jeb,

As a community nurse with Street Health, I was interested in reading your article, “Buddy can you spare a loonie?” However, I was concerned with some of the discriminatory language in the article and the lack of hard facts.

Everyone has an anecdote about giving change to a ‘bum’ and then watching him/her spending it on alcohol. Horrors! How come people with jobs and who are housed are not chastised for going to the booze store? I am particularly concerned with your statement “Most derelicts are lost causes.” Derelicts are defined in the dictionary as social outcasts or vagrants. You neglected to talk about the lack of affordable housing and jobs contributing to homelessness. How about the fact that welfare rates were cut 23% while rents were not. Apartment evictions have gone up 25%. People cannot get jobs (have you heard of the recent recessions?) or are laid off. Their unemployment runs out. They go on welfare. They cannot afford Toronto rents. They end up on the street. They cannot get welfare without an address. They cannot get an address because they do not have a job and they do not have first and last month’s rent. You did not discuss the fact that Toronto is a magnate for people from all over the country who come in the hopes of finding a job and a new life. You did not include the fact that people on the street are a heterogeneous group with a multitude of backgrounds and reasons for being there. You did not describe the pain and heartbreak of living on the street, the people who become mentally ill (depressed, suicidal) or addicted to alcohol and drugs AFTER they end up on the streets. The Street Health Report, 1992, found that only 22.8% had been hospitalized for a mental health problem at some time. Only 24% had been given a psychiatric diagnosis at one time. Only 13% had received a diagnosis such as schizophrenia, manic depressive disorder, panic disorder or cognitive impairment. And only 16.8% reported daily alcohol consumption, compared to 16% of the regular population in the Toronto Community Health Survey.

Furthermore, there is the fact that many people cope quite well with or without a job and a home until a life-changing event happens such as death of a parent or spouse combined with other losses such as loss of a job. And finally, why don’t people look at root causes of homelessness? What makes people VULNERABLE to homelessness? A large research study by Paul Koegel in California indicated that a very large number of the homeless had had severe social disruption, separation and abuse in their childhoods which is now thought to put people at risk for homelessness. Are we now creating a whole new generation of homeless by cutting housing, welfare and other social supports? The longer someone is homeless and trying to survive on the street, the harder it is to adjust to being housed, shopping for groceries, maintaining a job, nutrition, etc.

So while I thank you for writing about the ‘panhandlers,’ I ask you to be a little more informed and to stay away from the derogatory language!!!