Retired Ottawa fertility doctor Dr. Bernard Barwin was stripped of his licence Tuesday after a discipline hearing heard he inseminated several patients with the wrong sperm — in some cases his own. A five-member discipline panel at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario in Toronto was told that Barwin’s conduct stretches back to the 1970s. He was not present Tuesday, but his lawyer pleaded no contest on his behalf, meaning he does not admit guilt but does not contest the facts for the purpose of the discipline hearing. According to a statement of uncontested facts, Barwin inseminated a number of patients with sperm they thought either belonged to their husbands or anonymous donors they had selected based on their profiles. DNA testing decades later would reveal the children’s paternity was not as they had long believed. “There is no precedent for the case you have before you today at this college,” prosecutor Carolyn Silver told the panel.“Dr. Barwin did the unthinkable, the unimaginable, he engaged in the most horrific violation of his patients’ trust and of their bodies.”A report by OB/GYN Dr. Ed Hughes, retained by the college to review Barwin’s conduct, found it fell well below the standard of care. The discipline hearing was told one child — now an adult — who had always believed she had been conceived using an anonymous donor’s sperm, contacted an online DNA registry around 2015 which matched her with a Barwin relative in New York. Barwin arranged for a DNA test, which showed the woman, referred to as BB in the hearing, was his biological daughter. He then offered to meet with BB’s father and told him he did not know how this could happen, saying he only ever used his own sperm when testing an automated sperm counter, and perhaps it had become contaminated with the semen used to inseminate BB’s mother. (The college’s expert witness found this explanation im ...
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