‘Worst nightmare’: Respected fertility doctor impregnated three women with the wrong sperm
Near the end of a lengthy, laudatory profile in the Ottawa Citizen 12 years ago, Dr. Norman Barwin revealed that giving one of his artificial-insemination patients the wrong sperm would be “his worst nightmare.”
It was an unusual admission by a fertility specialist with a near-mythical reputation. Five years earlier, he had been made a member of the Order of Canada for work the governor general’s office said had had “a profound impact” on women’s reproductive health. He has led Planned Parenthood and the Infertility Awareness Association, provided treatment to the poor and disenfranchised, promoted abortion rights and earned an honorary degree from Carleton University.
The reason for his fear of semen mix-ups, however, became crystal clear on Thursday.
Dr. Barwin was suspended from practice for two months and sternly reprimanded, after admitting to a College of Physicians and Surgeons disciplinary panel that he had, indeed, impregnated three women with the incorrect semen over a two-decade period. One only discovered the blunder two years ago, when her son turned 23.
And the physician admitted there had been at least one other case of incorrect insemination, in 1995, handled less formally by the college, which urged him then to tighten up his practice.
As two of the families affected by his mistakes looked on stoney-faced, the discipline panel voiced dismay at the multiple errors, two of which occurred after the earlier warning.
Even with three years of investigation, no one is quite sure how the mistakes happened.
“It is hard to imagine a more fundamental error in your former speciality than that of failing to impregnate the right woman with the right sperm,” said Dr. Willing King, the panel’s chair. “Your errors have condemned [the parents] to psychological and emotional pain, and deprived the children of the ability to know their biological fathers.”