Doctor treated with his semen and got 200 pregnant women

The story looks like it came out of a Milan Kundera novel but its reality is shaking Canada these days, where a class action lawsuit of over 200 women exposed the case of Norman Barwin, a struggling fertility doctor. used their own semen or semen. to get their patients pregnant.

One of the stories that exposed this aberrant practice was that of Dan and Davina Dixon, who tried for years to conceive a child without success until they underwent the Barwin Treatment in 1990 and managed to have a baby. girl they name Rebecca. For more than two decades, the Dixon family believed Dan was the girl’s biological father. But a DNA test revealed that this girl was actually the daughter of the doctor who had helped them decades before.

Lawsuits

In 2016, the Dixons sued Barwin, but that was just the start: Over the past five years, their lawsuit has gained momentum as more and more of Barwin’s former patients have emerged. . Today, around 200 people are the subject of a class action lawsuit, alleging that Barwin used the wrong sperm – multiple times as his own claimed – in the artificial insemination of at least 100 patients.

So far, Barwin has denied everything, but the evidence is overwhelming. Para los Dixon, hay que decir, todo comenzó a desenredarse en febrero de 2016, cuando Davina vio una publicación en Facebook en la que decía que era unusual que dos personas con ojos azules tuvieran un hijo con ojos brunes, que era el caso de his family. Davina made an appointment with her doctor, who suggested a DNA test. This confirmed that Dan was not the biological father of his daughter Rebecca.

“When I discovered it, I felt dissociated from my body and my face,” Rebeca said in 2016. “When I looked at myself in the mirror, I suddenly felt like it wasn’t. was not my face. Features of me that I had always loved, or that I considered to be just mine, seemed to belong to someone else, and I didn’t know who I was. ”For Dan Dixon, c ‘was terrible: “My world has been turned upside down. Rebecca is our daughter but she is not our daughter. It is, but it is not. And that is why everything is different”.

Similar

The Dixons began to investigate, and in doing so, “they couldn’t help but realize that Rebecca looked suspiciously like Dr Barwin,” the family said in the lawsuit. Through Facebook, the girl met another conceived woman at the Barwin Clinic in Ottawa. When they logged in, Kat Palmer had previously used an ancestry website to trace her roots back to Barwin and, after prompting him to take a DNA test, confirmed he was her biological father, according to the trial.

Rebeca Dixon and Kat Palmer underwent DNA testing, which confirmed they were half-sisters with the same biological father. After the test confirmed that Palmer was Barwin’s daughter, the doctor told him he didn’t know how it was possible, but admitted to his father, Lyon Palmer, that he used his own sperm to test a sperm counter, according to the article. by 2016 by the Société Radio-Canada.

In 2019, Canadian medical authorities revoked Barwin’s medical license after determining he had committed professional misconduct. He pleaded unopposed and was ordered to pay a fine of $ 8,619. Before failing, regulators hired an experienced OB / GYN to look into Barwin’s case. The gynecologist concluded that Barwin caused “preventable harm” by inseminating dozens of women with the wrong sperm, some with his own.

Lawyer representing the Dixons, Peter Cronyn, estimates that between 1973 and 2012 Barwin inseminated around 500 patients who eventually had children, so the number of plaintiffs could exceed the more than 200 people included in the collective.

Barwin’s case is one of a kind but not the first of its kind: other fertility doctors have already been accused of similar actions. In Las Vegas, for example, dozens of people accused Quincy Fortier, a self-proclaimed “doctor of the year” fertility specialist, of secretly inseminating patients with his sperm while undergoing treatment. in a women’s hospital. The story was the subject of the HBO documentary “Baby God” released last year.

In New York City, an obstetrician and gynecologist artificially inseminated a woman with her own sperm in 1983 after he had promised to use an anonymous donor, according to a federal lawsuit filed in May and collected by the Miami New Times. In the lawsuit, the woman who gave birth to her son accused him of what she calls “medical rape”.

In the case of the Canadian doctor, Rebeca Dixon said in 2016 – when she filed her complaint – that it was good to go public with what had happened. “I feel very strongly that the secrets are shameful,” he said. “One of the reasons I feel relieved every time I tell someone in my life is that it takes away that feeling of shame.”