Awful.
A doctor in Canada is being accused of using his own sperm in impregnate women. The accusations have been brought to light through a court case involving a couple who are claiming that he could be their daughter’s biological father.
In 1989, Daniel and Davina Dixon sought help from Dr Norman Barwin to get pregnant with their daughter Rebecca. 26 years on, Rebecca and her parents have filed a lawsuit against Norman after they found out that Daniel wasn’t Rebecca’s biological father.
Rebecca first had suspicions about her parents when she read an article about the unlikely chance of two people with brown eyes having a child with blue eyes. She also noted that she never felt she looked like her father Daniel.
She told CBC News, “When I was younger, I was often asked if I was adopted. And we laughed about those situations. I don’t physically look a lot like my parents, but I look a little bit like my mother’s mom … I was never really concerned that there was any problem.”
According to The BBC, after taking a paternity test it revealed that Daniel was not her biological father and so they began to seek out the truth. After researching they found out that Dr Barwin had been sanctioned in 2013 for artificially inseminating three patients with the wrong sperm and subsequently resigned a year later.
A few months later Rebecca was contacted by a woman called Kathryn Palmer who had previously discovered in 2015 that Dr Barwin was her biological father. They did a DNA test which proved that the women were half sisters.
Dr Barwin’s lawyer, Karen Hamway, refused to comment on the new allegations, but said that they would be filing a legal statement of defence “in due course.”
