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Canadian medical authorities revoked the license of a fertility doctor who inseminated at least 11 womenwith his own spermandused the incorrect spermto impregnate between 50 and 100 patients.
The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario said that Dr. Norman Barwin, 80, is “incompetent,” and that his actions were “beyond reprehensible.”
The claims against Barwin, who worked at Ottawa General Hospital and an Ottawa clinic, span years,with some going back to the 1970s. He has not practiced since 2014, but during the hearing, which Barwin did not attend, Dr. Steven Bodley from the College said that it was “unfortunate” that the only action they could take against Barwin was to take away his license and impose a fine of $10,370 CAD.
Barwin claimed that “the only occasion he had used his own semen was when he was calibrating an automatic sperm counter,” and his sperm must have gotten mixed up with the donor sperm,NBC News reported.
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But the patient continued her research and found a woman who was searching for answers about her daughter’s genealogy. The daughter, born in 1990, oddly had celiac disease, even though she and her husband did not. The first woman found that she and the daughter were half siblings, and that Barwin had againused his own spermand is the father to both women.
They have since found nine other people who were born using Barwin’s sperm.
One woman, who thought Barwin was inseminating her with her husband’s sperm but used his own instead, said that she “felt violated — dirty — almost as if I had been raped,” after learning the truth, the BBC reported.
“Imagine the slow torture of watching my children grow up looking less and less like me,” he said.
source: people.com
