A Matter of Postal Codes Ken MacQueen WHAT IF YOU could see the future? What if you could see a young pregnant woman walking down Barton Street in Hamilton's depressed north end and know her unborn child had already lost life's lottery; that his or her fate was predetermined by Mom's postal code? You would know that this mother--in this neighbourhood, and in the bottom 20 per cent of the city's income earners--is six times less likely than the wealthiest Hamiltonian to seek first-trimester prenatal care, and more than six times as likely to be a teenager or to have dropped out of school. You'd know the chances of her baby being born underweight and needing weeks in neonatal intensive care would also be higher. And the child's life would get no easier thereafter. If its parents lived an average life in this neighbourhood, they would die an average Third World death--at 65.5 years of age. If they lived five or six kilometres away, say, on Rice Avenue in the city's leafy suburbs, they would live beyond 86 years. What if you knew one of the world's most advanced acute-care health facilities was here in Hamilton, yet was powerless to change the fate of this mother-to-be? What would you do?