EDITORIAL
Imagine finding out that your father isn’t really your biological parent. That’s the reality more than two dozen people have struggled with because of alleged mismatched sperm donations at the Ottawa fertility clinic once run by Dr. Norman Barwin.
The parents of these people went to Barwin for treatments to help them conceive using the male partner’s sperm. Instead, Barwin himself is thought to have provided the sperm that led to 11 pregnancies — without the couples in question knowing this. In another 16 cases, the family can’t identify the sperm donor at all.
Lawyers working on a class-action suit say they’ve been in contact with more than 150 people who have been “adversely affected” by Barwin’s actions. It is, as one parent put it, “such an intimate kind of violation.” One person told the Citizen’s Elizabeth Payne, she had tried to tell Barwin, “You are not breeding puppies, you are creating humans.”
What’s alleged to have occurred — the class-action suit has not yet been certified, nor has any evidence been tested in civil court — is indeed a violation: of privacy, of family life, of the pillars and assumptions on which people build their identities. Yet legal standards that could help protect couples from the sort of abuse implied in this case are shockingly lax. Decades after it began, the fertility industry is still something of a Wild West.
That is starting to change, but slowly. The Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons, which regulates this province’s doctors, has endorsed tighter rules for sperm and egg bank inspections, which could mean some clinics being shut if they don’t follow the rules. These standards must still be OK’d by the provincial government. With Ontario’s election distracting politicians, action is likely several months away.
More complicated — but in our view necessary — are changes to the Criminal Code so that fraudster fertility specialists face charges if they deceive couples over the treatments being provided. Families should not have to sue for some semblance of justice when their worlds are turned upside down by a specialist’s lies or sloppy practices.
The Ottawa case is not unique, after all. In another instance, a particular U.S. sperm donor was later found to be schizophrenic. He had donated sperm that helped dozens of women conceive, including in Canada, and is known to have fathered more than two dozen children. But the women were not told about his condition.
How widespread the phenomenon of fertility fraud is, no one truly knows. That’s unacceptable. Legislators need to fix it.