A Canadian woman is suing the fertility doctor who artificially inseminated her mother — after learning that he used his own sperm to impregnate her.
Rebecca Dixon, 26, always knew that something was different about her as a child.
While her parents are both fair-skinned with blue eyes, she bears an olive complexion and brown eyes — sparking loads of questions from friends about whether she was adopted, according to The Globe and Mail.
The Ottawa native was told for years that she was their biological daughter and that nothing was strange about her. But things changed forever in the spring after she was diagnosed with celiac disease, a hereditary condition that her family was not known to have.
Dixon and her parents, Daniel and Davina Dixon, decided to investigate further — and eventually learned through blood testing that her dad was type AB, while she was type O-positive, meaning he could not be her biological father.
“It was a complete shock,” Dixon told the Ottawa Citizen on Wednesday. “There’s a sense of injustice, there’s a sense of anger on behalf of my parents who do feel violated and betrayed.”
In April, Dixon’s dad underwent a paternity test — confirming that he was, in fact, not her father.
He and his wife had spent years trying to conceive before they went to a fertility clinic in 1989 operated by Dr. Norman Barwin. Dixon was born a year later.
After the paternity test, the family spent months speculating how Dixon could have been conceived. It wasn’t until they met a 25-year-old Vancouver woman named Kat Palmer, who had found herself in the same predicament, that they learned what really happened.
It turns out that Palmer had also been conceived at Barwin’s clinic about six months before Dixon — and after several DNA tests, she learned in 2015 that he was her biological father.
Palmer’s parents had always told her that her unnamed sperm donor was of German and Irish descent, but the genetic tests showed that her paternal line was Ashkenazi Jewish, the same as Barwin’s.
According to the Globe and Mail, the database she used also linked her to a second cousin in New York who was a relative of the doctor.
Palmer and Dixon were introduced in September — and through DNA testing, discovered last week that they were half-sisters and that Barwin was their father. Dixon and her parents filed a class-action lawsuit suit against him soon after, requesting that he provide a DNA sample so others who were conceived at his clinic can find out if they, too, are his offspring.
In 2013, Barwin was suspended from practice for two months after he admitted inseminating four different women with the wrong sperm. He resigned from the order of Canada a year later.
“[Barwin’s] reckless and wanton conduct, including the cavalier use of his own sperm in his insemination procedures, demonstrated a reprehensible disregard for the health, safety, and rights of the plaintiffs,” Dixon’s lawsuit reads.
She told the Ottawa Citizen that while she’s upset about what happened, learning the truth has strengthened the Dixon family’s bond.
“The love that we have is real and is not sort of diminished by this situation,” Dixon said. “I think we were all very concerned about would this change the dynamic and I think this showed it didn’t change the dynamic.”