Alvin Kaufman, Dorothea Palmer, Dr. William Hutton, the Parent's Information Bureau, and, "the Great Birth Control Trial"

Alvin Kaufman, from the Eugenics Archive.
Original photo from "Waterloo Hall of Fame".
Used under the "fair dealing" provision of
the copyright Act.

Alvin Kaufman (1888-1979) was a wealthy industrialist from Berlin (now Kitchener) Ontario who came from a family that owned various businesses including a significant one in the rubber business. People will most likely associate him with Kaufman Footwear which was founded by Alvin's father and which he took over in 1920.

He was very much a member of the "establishment" and held various important positions in the community including:

• chairman of the Kitchener Planning Board
• member of Kitchener Hospital Board
• member of University of Waterloo Board of Governors

For the purposes of this article, he was also famous for his support of access to birth control in Canada.

He founded and financed an organization called "The Parent's Information Bureau". This was quite a big project as it published fairly large library of pamphlets that advertised the idea of liberalizing access to birth control to Canadians of all classes. It also created a network of fifty visiting out-reach workers (mostly nurses) who would go to poorer homes across Canada to distribute information about birth control and sold birth control devices to poorer women "at cost".

Strictly speaking, this activity was illegal. The law against educating people about and selling birth control devices was generally ignored at pharmacies, however, because the customers tended to be upper-class men.

Dorothea Palmer.
Alas, I couldn't find an original
source citation.

One of the Bureau's out-reach workers, Dorothea Palmer, went from house to house in a predominately French-speaking, Roman Catholic, Ottawa suburb named Eastview. She was charged under the then current birth control law, which stated:

"Everyone is guilty of an indictable offense and liable to two years imprisonment who knowingly, without lawful excuse of justification, offers to sell, advertises, publishes an advertisement of or has for sale or disposal of any medicine, drug or article intended or represented as a means of preventing conception." (Section 179 of the 1892 Canadian Criminal Code)

However, instead of simply letting Palmer plead guilty, pay the fine, or, go to jail, Kaufman and the Parent's Information Bureau decided to hire some exceptionally groovy lawyers and put the law on trial instead of just the defendant. It's relatively hard to find information about things that happened this long ago without a great deal of time-consuming digging, but luckily there's an article by Bill Stephenson about the event in the Maclean's Magazine archive.

The key point at issue that the defense was arguing was sub-clause two of the law that stated that no one could be convicted of the crime if it could be shown that “the public good was served by the acts alleged”. With this in mind, among a great many other witnesses, Parker's legal team put Kaufman on the stand:

A. R. Kaufman, founder and head of the PIB [eg: the "Parent's Information Bureau"], was the next to testify. He told the court that he had first become interested in birth control as an aid to happier, healthier living when he noticed that in his own factory there was a direct relationship between absenteeism and large families. The less time between children, the more time the wage-earner lost through illness or other causes. In other words, those families which needed the most earned the least.

In a survey in 1929 to see how he could ease distress among such families, he discovered that many mothers had no idea how to space children. He therefore hired competent medical people and set up a clinic in his own factory, giving family-planning data to all who asked for it. So gratifying were the results that women all over Ontario began writing him for information. Thus the work had expanded. Some twenty-five thousand requests for boxes had been processed to date. (Stephenson, Maclean's, Nov 23 1957)

To make a long story short, the Parent's Information Bureau made their case, and charges were dropped against Dorothea Parker. Generally, most people (including myself) would consider this a very good thing for women's rights. But I do think it's important to understand what was motivating Kaufman in the work he was doing.

I think it's clear that Kaufman was a through-going Social Darwinist who was primarily concerned about keeping the genes of the human race "strong" rather than about making life easier for working class and poor. To understand this point, I'd draw reader's attention to a pamphlet that his organization published that was written by the Dr. William L. Hutton---who was at one time both the Medical Health Officer for Brantford and Director of the Brant County Health Unit, and, famous for his pioneering study of the effects of water fluoridation and tooth decay. (Hutton also was an occasional guest lecturer at the Macdonald Institute of the Ontario Agricultural College in Guelph.)  He was also (along with Kaufman) a member of the Eugenics Society of Canada. The pamphlet he wrote was titled A Brief for the Sterilization of the Feeble-Minded, which was subtitled "Prepared at the Request of The Association of Ontario Mayors at their Annual Conference, Orillia, June 1936".

It starts out by assuming a social Darwinist framework, which can be seen from the first two subtitles: "Nature Eliminates the Defectives" and "These Same Laws Apply to Man". It then goes on to argue that modern society has inverted the natural order because more intelligent, upper class individuals use modern birth control techniques to limit their family size while "feeble-minded" lower classes don't.

At this point, Hutton defines "feeble-mindedness" in a way that modern readers should take pains to understand. He says:

Because of their normal physical appearance, they appear to the casual observer to be persons of usual capacity, but they require supervision, for they suffer from arrested development of the mind, and they are incapable of competing on equal terms with their fellows. In cities they tend to drift towards the slums. In times of economic crisis they are among the first to require public assistance. They often live in conditions of extreme squalor. 

I'd like to draw reader's attention to two points that I made in my first article on this subject. If you recall the graphic that I posted there, the definition that people used to identify the "feeble minded" was extremely broad.

It called anyone who was only able to do "complex manual work"---which I would assume includes being a plumber, pipe-fitter, machinist, blacksmith, etc---was a "moron". Only people who could do work "requiring reason and judgment"---which I can only assume would be things like being a doctor, lawyer, or, businessman---would be considered a "real human being".

The key point to pay attention to is in that phrase "they are incapable of competing on equal terms with their fellows". Remember that according to social Darwinism everything is supposed to be settled by competition---it's not a bug, but a feature of the system.

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Hutton makes clear that he isn't concerned about what he calls "idiots" and "imbeciles", whom he says

"most frequently owe their defect to birth injuries, accident, or, disease. In other words, idiots and imbeciles frequently come from normal parents who have the prevalent one, two or three-child family. On the other hand, the high-grade defectives (the feeble-minded) frequently come from sub-normal families in which the birth rate is high and in which feeble-mindedness is prevalent and plainly inherited".  (p-4)

He then goes on to describe the feeble-minded as having the intellectual capacity of "ten or twelve years of age" and says of them:

"We would not think of permitting children of ten or twelve years of age, to assume the responsibility of providing for and training other children, and yet we permit the feeble-minded with the intelligence of such children to do this very thing. We misunderstand them to our own undoing, and fail to recognize that it is to their benefit as much as to our own for the intelligent electorate to control their reproduction." (p-4)     

Through a rhetorical "sleight of hand", Hutton then goes on to talk about the cost of housing people in mental hospitals in Ontario. This is intellectually dishonest, because he started off talking about what he labels "idiots" and "imbeciles", which he says actually cannot be prevented through sterilization because they are mostly the result of accidents and disease, and who's parents could not be identified as potential parents of these "defective" children. Secondly, it brings in a totally extra group of individuals---the mentally ill---who again couldn't be identified through their parents, and who often have problems clearly caused by abuse rather than genetics. Finally, the very framework that he uses to identify the "feeble-minded" is not one where they are incapable to caring for themselves, but rather that they cannot compete effectively against the normal population. Remember, earlier on in this document he said that one of their identifying characteristics is "In times of economic crisis they are among the first to require public assistance". This would imply that they are actually able to support themselves in times of full employment. Their problem isn't being able to take care of themselves, it is not being able to beat out other people when there simply isn't enough to go around. That is a totally different thing!

Raising a complete non-sequitor, Hutton starts quoting numbers from mental hospitals and suggests that the only alternative to sterilizing the "feeble-minded" is to put them in a mental hospital (a false dilemma). Then he quotes statistics from England and suggests that if Ontario put every feeble-minded person in a hospital bed, the result would be between a doubling and tripling of the mental hospital facilities in the province. He then says that this would result in an extra cost of $20 million/year to the taxpayer (that would be $380 million in today's money).

(Just for fun, let's do a comparison between Hutton's hypothetical numbers and our current situation. In 1936 Hutton wrote that Ontario had a population of 3.6 million, and now has a population of 14.6 million. He was proposing spending  $5.56/person/year [that's $103/year in today's dollars.] According to the Canadian Mental Health Association in 2017 the Ontario government spent $3.5 billion on mental health issues, that's $240/person/year [that's $13 in 1936 money]. As a means of comparison, the average bricklayer [ie: a job for a "moron"] in Toronto earned $1872/year in 1936.)

I think that what people should pay attention to, however, is the way Hutton is trying to use concern about fiscal policy to drive social policy. I've taken the time to "geek out" on the numbers in order to emphasize that financial arguments are often used to drive social policy that has a profoundly negative effect on individuals. A similar situation happened when the provincial government decided to "deinstitutionalize" mental patients in the 1970s. Originally, in that case the intent was to put most of these patients into group homes where they would be more integrated into the community, which would help them with their treatment. Unfortunately, governments of the day decided to shut down the expensive hospitals and largely pocketed the money saved instead of setting up just as expensive quality group homes to replace them. The result are the hordes of mentally ill individuals haunting our streets and warehoused in grotesquely expensive prison cells. Beware of social policy once it gets in the hands of the bean-counters!  

Indeed, I've been trying to point out the formal reasoning problems (eg: the "nonsequitor" and "false dilemma") and the failure of inductive reasoning (eg: the misuse of economic data) to show that according to the "steps" system of human classification, Dr. Hutton himself could be shown to be incapable of "work using reason and judgement". That would mean that he too could be called a "moron" and encouraged to not have any children. (What's sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander, no?)

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There's a scene in the movie No Country for Old Men where two career army sergeants are having lunch in a diner. They've gone to the woman's parents to introduce the man and announce their engagement. The couple is biracial and the man asks the woman if her dad had a problem with his race. She replies "No. He probably would, but he's just so happy that I'm not a lesbian that he doesn't mind you." The man replies "Isn't it great when one prejudice cancels out another---".

I think that that's really how we should understand how the laws against birth control unraveled in Canada. One prejudice canceled out another. It wasn't that people decided that women should have the right to control their own reproduction so much as that the wealthier classes were afraid that the "feeble-minded" were going to swamp the gene pool. Luckily it never came to the situation we saw in NAZI Germany, where the government forced sterilization on some people. Kaufman and Hutton were pragmatists and their own experience showed them that given their druthers poor women would gladly forgo extra pregnancies if they could. As a result, they never went completely "Herrenvolk" and advocated enforced sterilization.

The length on this post is "red-lining", so I'll save other comments for something in the future.

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Furthermore, I say onto you the climate emergency must be dealt with!