All Fertility Doctors Are Bastards

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
What's without an introduction my podcast. I'm Robert Evans, host
of Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you
everything about the worst people in all of history and
are chronically unprepared to actually start the show that allows
me to pay rent and buy food. Um, I'm ashamed
of me. I'm sure Sophie's ashamed of me, but I

(00:23):
can't know. Oh now I can know because she said yes.
But you know who's fifty chance not ashamed of me?
My guest today, Mr Billy Wayne Davis. I am not.
I'm not proud, but I'm not ashamed, do you know
what I mean? That's what I shoot for, Like you
pulled it out kind of yeah. Yeah, but everybody listening
is going come on, man, yeah, I'm uh. You know.

(00:47):
The lesson I learned long ago is that if I
just keep talking, um, about sixty percent of the time,
I can pull victory from failure. Um. And I learned
that lesson with cops, but it applies to podcasting too. Yeah,
it's I think it applies to a lot more of
life than it should that if you just keep talking
a lot of times, most people be like, all right,
just get it, all right, just get going. Speaking of

(01:12):
getting going, Billy Wayne, have you ever used a fertility doctor?
That is an inappropriate questions? I'm pre open um. I
have two kids, and I wasn't actively planning but either
of them. I wasn't upset that it happened either. But no,
I haven't. I haven't. Okay, Well, um, would you be

(01:32):
would you be surprised? Like? What do you what do
you think when you think like a fertility doctor? Like,
do you have any sort of conceptions in your head
about the kind of person who would take that job?
I think it feels like someone that wants to help
couples create life and create a family. That seems like
a like somebody like a family doctor that was like, Oh,

(01:54):
I'm pretty good at making this happen. So I and
I have a good bedside manner. Let's go that help
see these people out. It seems like like a fundamentally
noble endeavor, right, Yeah, I like that. It seems correct,
It seems noble. Well, the working title of our episode
is all fertility doctors are bastards. Uh, and that's that's

(02:18):
not entirely fair. And the the large fertility doctor contingent
of bastards pod listeners are probably angry, but I will
say from everything I can tell, it is a field
with like a shockingly high rate of a very specific
type of bastard. And that's what we're going to talk
about today. Yeah, it's weird. Um, it'll all make sense
in the end, but the journey is going to be

(02:39):
a little bizarre. See m M, you know what that's.
I mean, as long as they get as long as
we get them graduated from medical school, I think we're
step ahead of everything else we've done. Well. Yes, yes,
these are definitely I don't know. You know actually, Billy, Yeah,
put a pin in that because you and I primarily

(03:01):
talk about fake doctors, and it's really debatable as to
whether or not a lot of these people are, Like
they all have m d s. So I will say,
like in that regard, yes, they're more real than the
fake doctors we normally talk about. But I think in
a fundamental way, all of the people were talking about
today are in fact fake doctors, regardless of their real

(03:21):
um m D credentials. See it's like, you don't think
of that part of doctor because yeah, you think that
law there's a lot of lawyers that go to that
you know, whatever, and they're like, yeah, I'm technically a lawyer,
and you're like, okay, whatever. I mean, your whole profession
is technicalities anyway, But yeah, a doctor is that I'm
a doctor? Next, son of a bitch? Yeah, yeah, yeah,

(03:44):
this is this is an episode about the gray area
and the fake doctor designation. So we'll we'll circle back
around to discussing that around the end if I remember too,
because about eighty percent of the time when I say
we'll circle back to something, we completely forget um and
never do. And that is also one of the hallmarks
of my show, along with terrible introductions. So yeah, this

(04:06):
episode originally started as a fan submission of a subject,
Dr Norman Barrwin. Uh. He's a Canadian fertility doctor who
is a real piece of ship. And we will still
be talking about Dr Barwin, but as I dug into
his story, I come upon a bigger, weirder, and bastardier
story and that is what we will be talking about today. Um. Now,

(04:27):
there are a million different places we could start, but
in the interest of simplicity, I'm going to kick it
off in nineteen thirty nine with the birth of Bernard
Norman Barwin. Barwin was born in South Africa to parents
who I'm sure existed at some point, but I do
not know you know anything else at all about them? Uh,
not a lot of information on this guy's early life. Um,

(04:47):
we do know that he went to college at the
Queen's University in Northern Ireland and moved to Canada in
the nineteen seventies to work as a doctor, and on paper,
his career looked about as woken wonderful as it's possible
to be. Norman founded the first sexual health clinic for
schools in Ottawa. He was a very public and charismatic
advocate for expanded sex education and reproductive medicine. He spent

(05:10):
time driving around the Canadian capital and what he called
a sex bus. Now it's pre internet, right, Yeah, it's
pre internet because there's a bang bus in Florida I
knew about. Yeah, this is very different from the bang bus. Um.
Rather than being the set for a low budget porn
the sex bus was a way for Dr Barwin to

(05:32):
distribute pamphlets on sexual health. Many d walked into that bus.
So this is not what. Don't go in there, man,
They got reading stuffs, just paper. I love that the
passers by uh that that we voiced in our episodes
are always Southerners, even when we're talking about Ottawa. Yes,

(05:54):
that is. I mean, to quote the comedian Jesse Case,
who's Southern. He was like, I mean it sucks, but
when I even when Southerners do a dumb voice, it's
just a more Southern voice. And you're like, that's so true.
You're doing the guy from the town over, Yes, exactly,
the dumber guy in your neighborhood, dumb dogs. And you're like,

(06:19):
I think King of the Hill is the ultimate example
of that, because like every one of Hank's friends is
a different sort of fake Southern voice that I would
do based on somebody. I know. It's the it's my
judge doing that. It's just him watching people in his alley,
going like I can do all these voices. I think,
uh so um yeah. Barwin, the Good Dr. Barwin was

(06:42):
an early advocate for abortion rights. He also grew increasingly
interested in finding ways to help single women and lesbian
couples have babies, and over time this grew into an
interest in fertility in general. Now artificial insemination. Billy Wayne
traces its roots back to the seventeen hundreds, when a
Gottish surgeon what other nationality would have been behind it?

(07:03):
Named John Hunter impregnated a woman with her husband's sperm.
According to the National Institutes of Health quote, a cloth
merchant with severe hypospattius was advised to collect the seamen
which escaped during coitus in a warmed syringe and inject
the sample into the vagina. Now, hypospattius is a birth
defect where the opening of your penis is on the
bottom of the head rather than its normal location. So

(07:23):
that's the first recorded artificial human insemination. But a clockmaker
is that what she said? Uh? Yeah, a cloth merchant
is the guy is the guy who like was having
trouble knock and his wife. Doctor was like, the way
I heard you say it was that they hired him
to take the sample, and I was like, what a
weird choice. No, no, no, no, that's the that was

(07:45):
the client. John Hunter was just like, yeah, we just
get to get you a warm syringe, fill it with
com and use that as your penis. And he was right, yeah,
it was right, Yeah, it makes sense. Yeah. So for
most of the next couple of centuries, artificial and eimination
was primarily the purview of farmers and mainly used on
livestock like cows. Human beings did figure out how to

(08:07):
successfully free sperm in order to keep them viable in
about nineteen fifty three, but a lot of people thought
it was a moral to do that with human sperm,
and so it wasn't until the nineteen seventies that artificial
insemination of human beings really took off as a practice
and started to become very common. What happened that it
became okay, I don't know, I think just enough old

(08:29):
people died off, and like everyone else was like, oh,
why do we give a shit about this? Seven everybody's
on fucking cocaine, like whatever. Yeah, uh so. Dr Norman
Barrwin then came of age as a doctor at a
time when sort of the very first generation of professional
fertility doctors were starting to become a thing. You know,
there's been some before, but he was really with like

(08:52):
the first wave of people who made it into kind
of a mainstream profession. So he was very much on
the cutting edge of this science. Tony Hawk, Yeah, like
Tony Hawk. He's the Tony Hawk of using cold sperm
to impregnate women whose husbands are having difficulties doing that
for some reason. That's yeah, yep, yep, a shoot for something,

(09:13):
I guess. Yeah, I mean Tony Hawk also has a
weird cold sperm obsession, but we'll save that for the Yeah,
and if you're true Tony Hawk Fane, you know what
we're talking about. Oh yeah, very well aware. Now. Barwin
quickly rose to become the president of the Canadian Fertility
Society and eventually also the president of the Planned Parenthood
Federation of Canada. Barwin worked as a professor of obstetrics

(09:35):
and gynecology at the University of Ottawa and I also
had a healthy career as a gynecologist. Yeah, so far,
he's he's the realist doctor we've talked about, right, without
a doubt. There's no there's no bleach. Uh, there's no yet. Yeah,
he hasn't drowned trying to make them. It's like the

(09:56):
opposite of what we've been talking about. So right now,
I'm like, this guy is great. Yeah, right now, this
guy does actually seem to be a great doctor. Um.
And of course, uh, while he worked you know in
a kind of wore a lot of hats as a
medical professional, his real passion was increasingly fertility, and once
he left the University of Ottawa, he devoted the bulk

(10:16):
of his time to helping parents get pregnant. Dr Barwin
was beloved by many of his patients. He was invested
into the Order of Canada for his quote profound impact
on both the biological and psychosocial aspects of women's productive health.
He won the Barber cass Begs Award for Women's Reproductive
Rights and the Queen's Golden Jubilee Medal for his pioneering

(10:37):
success and helping women conceive uh. In fact, Dr Norman
Barwin developed such a reputation for his ability to help
infertile couples make babies that his patients started giving him
a nickname, the baby God. Oh wow, I'm sure that Yeah,

(10:58):
you know, let's just back off that one. It's just
that is a weird thing to call someone like like I,
I yeah, I don't say, well, like you said like
one or two people like hey, the baby got over
there and then it catching on is very strange. Yeah,
Like if I had an intractable health issue, like say

(11:20):
I had a U T I and like, yeah, I
couldn't get it fixed for like years until like I
finally found a doctor who was like able to deal
with the problem. I wouldn't call him the urinary tract God.
That would be bizarre. That would that would seem weird
and not like a compliment. No, no, And he would
be like, hey, let's let's don't you shouldn't say that.

(11:42):
You don't say that, you should say that. I'll give
you another one if you if you never say that again.
But doctor, Yeah, he makes babies. And you're like like
as like, yeah, if your wife came home, she's like,
I don't want to go see the baby God, and
you're like, hmmm, I want to go with you. I'm
gonna go with you. Yeah, I'm I'm gonna check out
this guy. Yeah. Yeah. And they spoiler they absolutely should

(12:04):
have been checking out this guy, because I think that's
what they called Sean Camp was the baby got the
baby God. He just had a lot of kids. Yeah,
that's fair. Yeah, yeah, they should have called him Doc
stork Um. That was good. That's good. That's better, that's better.
And that's not creepy. That's like homie and like kind
of warm. You know. Baby God is is creepy. It

(12:28):
is creepy, like you too, Yeah, he can kill your baby.
It makes me think of uh, from my fellow nerds
out there, one of the best monsters in the Dungeons
and Dragons, like third edition Monster Manual was this giant,
hovering aborded god fetus. It's very cool monster. Um. Anyway,

(12:48):
that's that's that's a reference for the nine people uh
listening to this podcast right now. I know, I got
I just kind of zoned out and then I zoned
back in when you said aboarded god atis where I'm like,
what are you guys doing over there? That's what reels
them all back in is aborted god fetus. Hold on,
hold on, say that again. Gods can have abortions, Yes, yes,

(13:09):
they can. Yeah, and when they have an abortion, that
abortion is also a god. That is the problem is
not a happy one where abortions become God's because you
can't get son of a bitch. So the baby God
was the Dr Norman Barwin that the vast, vast majority
of people in Canada knew up until quite recently, and

(13:31):
to most of them he was considered a hero. But
there were some signs early on that not all was
well in Dr Barwin's practice in Nive. He made a
mistake and gave a couple the wrong sperm for their child. Now,
considering how new the science of fertility was in nineteen
eighty five, that Air made relatively little impact in his career.

(13:52):
Everybody's gonna screw up, even groundbreaking physicians. You can't make
babies without spilling a little bit of spine. I mean
when you said it, I was like, I mean, whatever, Yeah,
everyone's gonna sunk up. Like and you, you know, you
consider other doctor mistakes were like a guy dies on
the operating table. A baby that's slightly different from the

(14:12):
baby you intended to have, not a big deal, right yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, jump,
this one's way better. Yeah yeah, we both have exzemo.
This baby is gonna do great, fantastic. So in the
mid nineteen nineties, though, it happened again. A lesbian couple

(14:33):
sued Dr Barwin for giving them semen other than the
semen that they had selected from their chosen donor. Yeah yeah, Now.
According to the Toronto Star quote, that incident was designated
a prior error in the agreed statement of facts presented
to the panel Thursday. On that occasion. Barwin was notified
of this error by the College of Physicians and Surgeons
of Ontario and states that he took some steps to

(14:55):
endeavor to ensure that no such errors would occur in
his practice in the future. So again, two errors, you know,
in like a decade, really not a big deal. But
the errors kept happening twice more during the late nineteen nineties,
and since Dr Barwin inseimilated a lot of ladies, he
was still generally seen by most people is incredibly good

(15:16):
at it, although it was now clear that there were
some issues in his practice. That said, his high success
rate meant he would still be the guy that you'd
go to when other fertility doctors couldn't get you knocked up,
So the mistakes kind of got swept under the rug.
Nobody thought anything sinister was going on. Dr Barwin continued
his career as a celebrated physician. In two thousand three,

(15:36):
during an interview, he told a reporter that accidentally inseminating
a patient with the wrong sperm was his quote worst nightmare,
which you know, yeah, now a decade later that nightmare
burst onto the public stage. Like, I don't know, I
should have made like an analogy to to like, you know,
water breaking or something, but I didn't think too and

(15:58):
I can't properly word it now. I think we're okay
without it, you know what I mean? So yeah, I
think like burst onto the stage like a bunch of
amniotic fluid. That good? Yeah, or just yeah because and
here's the thing, like just slowly took its time coming out. Yeah, yeah,
that's that's that's really usually have they in my experience,

(16:19):
like they're not like, hey, I'm here, They're like yeah, yeah,
they kind of don't want to leave, which considering the world,
makes sense. Oh yeah, No, I'm still every time I
think about him, like it seems like that we started
off in the best bond. Yeah. Every time I have
to wake up, I am reminded of how difficult it
must be to be a baby. You down and you

(16:40):
feel your belly out and you're like, damn it, goddamnit,
still not there. So. Dr Barwin was found to have
mixed up the sperm that had created four of the
babies born from his clinic. According to the Star Quote,
at least four of those babies aren't the biological result
of their fathers or the sperm donor designated by their
mothers because of mistakes at Barwin's clinic experts, dispatched to

(17:02):
review procedures at the facility, could isolate no evident reasons
for the mix up. Those children will never know the
male side of their parentage, thus left forever ignorant of
crucial medical history details. So one of those babies had
grown into a man by two thousand thirteen, and he
testified against Dr Barwin and had to essentially explain what
damage had been done to him as the result of

(17:23):
the fact that nobody knew who his biological father might be.
The twenty five year old asked, why do I look
like this? Who do I look like? I know I
look like my mother, But what about the other side?
I'll never know? Yes, I'm grateful I'm here, but there's
the other side, another story. I don't know my medical history,
and that's kind of scary. It's like, yeah, this is
a real problem, you know. Uh. And these funk ups

(17:45):
at this point, by like isn't thirteen were bad enough
that Dr Barwin was finally punished, albeit with the medical
equivalent of a slap on the wrist. He was found
guilty of unprofessional conduct and incompetence, and his medical license
was suspended for sixty days. He also had to thirty
dollars in legal fees. The young man who testified against
him was not satisfied by this justice just a two

(18:07):
month band, He said afterwards, I think you should completely
lose his license. So I don't know at that point,
you know, Uh, I mean to be honest, if I'm like,
if I'm like trying to evaluate it fairly and I
don't know the rest of the story, five or six
errors in like forty years, it doesn't seem that bad.
I don't. That's where I'm at right now too. It's like, yeah,
I just I feel like, I don't know. Have you

(18:29):
played baseball? It's mostly years. It's hard. Yeah, everybody sucks
up more than that, Like you, I know, like we
hold doctors to a higher standard, but still well in
the theory we do. But I'm completely with you on
this where it's like I just feel like he's and

(18:49):
when he sucks up, you still get a baby. You
still got a baby. Yeah, there's not alligators coming out
of women's like like woombsy, Like he's not sucking up
that bad. He gave you just not exactly what you wanted,
which feels like what God does anyway in theory, that's

(19:10):
just having a kid. Yeah. Now, most doctors probably would
have gotten harsher punishments than a sixty days suspension of
their license, but the court took Dr Barrwin's sterling career
into account, his pro choice advocacy, his groundbreaking work in
reconstructive surgery for transgender people, and his many awards. All

(19:31):
these mitigating factors saved him from losing his medical license,
but they did not save him from attracting greater scrutiny
from Canadian journalists. In the wake of his sentencing, The
Star published a deep dive into the doctor. The title
of their article is one of my favorite titles in
journalism history, Wrong Sperm, Dr Barrwin took Shortcuts and career

(19:51):
and racist too Wow races. Yeah. Yeah. The reporters the
Star revealed that Dr Barwin was also an inveterate marathon cheater,
which we're going to talk more about in a little Why.
I just my jaw dropped, because that's just like why,
I don't know that. Yeah, that's not one to cheat

(20:13):
on You're just like, yeah, anyone can cheating, is not
That's hilarious. I think it all makes sense when we
get through the rest of this guy's backstory because it
all it all seems actually kind of pretty much in
line to me. But yeah, it's it's quite a title.
What do they call him? Wrong sperm doctor? That is

(20:33):
a good I mean, if you're gonna go with baby
God for a while, I think wrong sperm doctor is
fitting when they figure you out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I
love thinking of the editorial meeting where they're like, how
do we get across that this is a doctor who
put the wrong sperm in people? In the fewest words possible,
what about wrong sperm doctor? And they all laughed and

(20:54):
then they were like, let's do it. Yeah, it's Canada
up there now, Billy Wayne. You know what's as good
as calling Dr Barrwin the wrong sperm doctor? This transition
to ads, it was smooth. I was like, yeah, like,

(21:16):
is this silk? Are we on silk right now? You
barely noticed it, didn't You almost slid right by? Yeah?
I thought we were still talking. Slid right by like
one of the baby gods babies sliding out of a
birth canal. Say you still don't what you wanted? Yep,
I did? I think that should have been You'll get
you might not get what you want, but you'll get

(21:37):
what you want. And speaking of getting what you want
products and we're back. That started out as a rough
transition to ads, but I think I think we found
the right transition to right. It felt right, It felt right.

(21:58):
It's kind of like, Hey, you don't always get the
baby be you'd planned to have, but you always get
the baby you're supposed to have, the you're supposed to have,
unless your baby's hitler. Then you know. I still think
that there was a couple that was the baby they
were supposed to have them. Yep, that's how destiny works,
I think so. Um. Yeah, So, reporters with the Star

(22:20):
found out that Dr Barwin was a marathon cheater, which yeah, again,
we're gonna get to it a little bit. They also
found out that, despite being a professor of gynecology uh
and a practicing gynecologist, Dr Barwin was not in fact
a gynecologist. Uh yeah, or at least he was not
a Canadian gynecologist. He had been a gynecologist in Northern

(22:42):
Ireland and when he'd moved to Canada, his employer had
let him do the job with the understanding that in
three years he would need to take the gynecology exam
for the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada.
Dr Barwin did take that test several times, but he
repeatedly failed it. He maintained his status as a general physician,
but that was it now. Somehow, in spite of this,

(23:03):
he was made the director of the High Risk Pregnancy
Clinic and the co director of the Fertility Clinic, and
he was allowed to teach other people how to be gynecologists.
Um rude Canada follow up a question, I guess yeah,
Are you don't be rude? I'm sorry. I'm sorry he

(23:24):
failed this test. Should we tell him he can't work?
Is again ecologist anymore? Just go to the Tim Horton's Yeah.
Uh so, I'm gonna quote again from the Star. Attempting
to explain how this happened. Questioned long afterwards by the
Ottawa Citizen, Barwin it first claimed he left Ottawa General

(23:45):
because he wanted more freedom than implied resentment among professional colleagues,
and finally asserted that he had nothing to prove because
he'd been certified by the Royal College of Obstetrics and
Gynecologists in England. He did indicate embarrassment over the controversy.
I'm not proud of it. I ain't got nothing improve,
I ain't got nothing to prove. I ain't taking your test.

(24:06):
I ain't trying to prove I'm a doctor. Well, you
said you're a doctor, and you didn't say you could
do this job, and then failed the tests that we've
set to make sure people could do this job. Now
that you have nothing to prove, you can't prove it.
I tried using that line the last time I failed
a driver's license test. It did not work. Um, but

(24:32):
I ain't trying to prove you people I've never made.
I can't drive a car, or can drive a car.
I ain't what I'm trying to do, you asked the
homeless man embedded in the grill of my truck. If
I can drive, he'll tell you. I knows how. First
of all, I don't think it's any of your business
if I'm drunk or not. Right now, that's not your bid.
I got nothing to prove. I ain't anything proved. Now

(24:54):
give me my picture car. Oh all right now, Billy,
are you ready to talk about Dr Barwin's marathon cheating? Yes,
I that was that. I don't know why piques my
interest more than the making babies. He's not supposed to
because because I feel like that's just most of professional athletes. Well,

(25:16):
in the year two thousand, doctor but not a guy
in ecologist Barwin ran the Boston Marathon, and he pulled
down a pretty incredible time three hours and seventeen minutes.
That put him at Yeah, that's a good ass time. Now,
that put him at number fourteen in the sixty to
sixty nine age group. And for some reference to people
who aren't runners, a three hour and seventeen minute marathon

(25:38):
would be fucking good if you were twenty like that,
that's a great time for a healthy young person that
runs a lot. His time at the Victoria Marathon in
British Columbia, which had qualified him for the Boston Marathon,
had been even better. He'd managed it in less than
three hours. But it's that is insane. Would be incredible

(26:01):
if he had actually gotten either of those times to see.
The Boston Marathon doesn't just take people's word for their time.
It monitors runners with cameras, referees, computer timing equipment, and
microchips attached to the shoes of runners, and when race
officials looked into Dr Barwin's time, they found a couple
of issues. Glenn McGregor, a reporter for the Ottawa Citizen,

(26:21):
who dug into Barwin, managed to dig up a letter
the director of the marathon had sent Barwin three days
after the race, quote, you failed to appear at multiple
checkpoints along the marathon route. Please provide this office with
any information that may be helpful to assist in authenticating
that you did run the entire marathon course, including type
of clothing worn, other visual identification, split times, companion runners,

(26:43):
et cetera. Dr Barwin had, of course, nothing to back
up his claims he was disqualified. He will tell you
exactly where. Uh. He was disqualified and banned forever from
the Boston Marathon. A month later, when McGregor questioned him
about this, initial response, his answer was quote I'm not

(27:04):
quite sure now what happened, whether I had a faulty
chip or what. But later, according to the Star quote,
he changed his story, admitting he dropped out around the
tin k point because of an inguinial hernia, jumping back
in at the end because he wanted to experience the
exhilaration of crossing the finished level group of friends. I
thought i'd feel the high of coming in. I got

(27:26):
a friend to give me a lift to the finish.
Barwin told the paper, I have a hard time with this.
It wasn't my intent to do this. It was a
breaking point, you know. Yeah, it's a breaking point. Yeah. Man, Hey,
I gotta I want to feel like wants it feel
like a win. Like now you should get nothing nothing

(27:47):
to do out of your side right now. Man. No,
So you're a doctor, so the gynecologist. Okay, okay, best
gynecologist in Canada. Now let me see that vagina and
he just like lifts up a woman's name. So The

(28:13):
Ottawa Citizen doug further and found that Dr Barwin had
also cheated at a local marathon in Ottawa. He'd finished
first in his age group at just over three hours,
but later digging found that he'd never finished the second
lap of the race. When pressed on this, Barwin again
blamed his hernia, claimed he'd limped out of the race,
and assumed they'd have recorded him as quitting, even though
he rejoined the race a kilometer away from the finish line.

(28:35):
It's really embarrassing for me. It was quite out of character.
I promise you. Yeah, getting caught that is not in
my character. I cheat. I am not used to getting caught,
and I am embarrassed right now now. Unfortunately for Dr Barwin,
this is the part of the story where he starts
getting caught at stuff besides Marathon cheese. I think so, yeah,

(29:01):
because I know anything about her, because I feel like
the whole time, she's like, did you cheat again? Cheat again?
He's like, I beat three hours. She's like, you keep cheating. Yeah.
He's the kind of guy that would like come back
from a football game with a stolen trophy and been like,

(29:22):
look at me, I'm a running back. I won the
football game today. She's like, you're sixty one years old.
So I played for the Argonaze played for the Toronto
Organ Now. Dr Barwin maintained his medical license for another
year after that two case where he got suspended for
two months. But now that his name was in the

(29:42):
news for mixing up sperm, other Barwin babies and their
parents started getting DNA tests to see if they were
who they thought they were. Yeah, this became a problem
very quickly. One Barwin baby eventually began to suspect that
the doctor himself was her biological father after a DNA
test showed she was not genetically related to the man
who had raised her. According to NBC quote, Barwin confirmed

(30:05):
through a DNA test that he was her father, but
said the only occasion he had used his own seamen
was when he was calibrating an automatic sperm counter, and
some of it must have become mixed up with donor sperm.
Oh man, come on, dude, you're buying that billy God.
I was cleaning it and it went I was cleaning
mind and it went off. And that's what that's how,

(30:26):
that's how you got here. I must have shot it
into the the crop pot of other jizz in my laboratory.
Shouldn't have kept him all in the same bowl. I mean,
it isn't hanging like when you confront somebody like that.
You everyone expects like that moment when you're like, ah,

(30:46):
I got you, and they're gonna be like, Okay, you
got me. But that never happens with people like this.
They're always like no. Probably what happened was like a
bird came and took some of my jazz and put
it in the US and then we had a bird problem.
And you're just like I can't even this is god

(31:06):
damn it. Yes, that's all you can say is just
God damn And he's like, goddamn it, there's fucking birds. Yeah,
you know. So, uh, that lie, if it ever was believable,
and I don't think that it was crumbled immediately under
a flood of new victims. One of these was a

(31:28):
patient who had given birth in ninete to a daughter.
She thought she that Dr Barwin had used her husband sperm,
but then her daughter wound up with Celiac disease, a
genetic condition neither parents shared. Dr Barwin resigned his medical
license and shame in two thousand fourteen, but people continued
to come forward. One of those people was a young
woman with the last name of Palmer. Her journey started

(31:50):
with the DNA test she took for an online registry.
She knew she'd been the product of a sperm donor,
and she wanted to know if she had any relations
in the area. To her surprise, she had one, a
second cousin who just so happened to be related to
Dr Barwin, the futility doctor who had artificially inseminated her mother.
Palmer set to work trying to unravel this mystery. At

(32:11):
one point, she confronted Dr Barwin, who informed her that
Alas he'd lost the donor registry and there was no
way to figure out who her biological father was. Oops,
it was me. It was me. But oops, we don't know.
I don't know it was me. We don't have any
proof to it must have went down the that fucking

(32:34):
bird dropped it into the jiz bucket. Now, now all
the inks run off, and I'm gonna quote now from
the Ottawa Citizen. I don't know how this happened, she
recounts Barwin telling her, and what would have become a

(32:55):
familiar refrain, the fertility doctor had something else to say
to Palmer. He told me, I was Sessa for wanting
the answer. You are young, You are in a healthy relationship.
Isn't that enough for you? He asked, That's such a dick. Yeah,
Palmer says she tried to Yeah, what you're here? What

(33:17):
you're here? You got a boyfriend? Why do you care?
Who sperm made you? Shut up? Now? Palmer says she
tried to be cordial as possible to keep a line
of communication open. Inside, she says she was seething with
rage at the roadblocks. Dr Barrwin's clinic seemed to be
putting up to prevent her from getting more information about herself.

(33:39):
I can't imagine you, like at one point, no daughter
of mine's going to talk to me likely this, and
you're just like damn. I was trying to get into
his head that this isn't a ridiculous question. You are
not breeding puppies, you are creating humans. This seems really
reasonable like Palmer eventually grew convinced that her sperm donor

(34:03):
had either been Dr Barwin or someone close to him.
She did eventually get him to take a DNA test
that confirmed he was her father. Dr Barrwin insisted this
had all been the result of some tremendous, terrible funk up.
In a two thift email, he wrote her this quote,
I cannot understand how this could have happened. This has
caused me much stress and remorse. I regret that we

(34:23):
both have had to endure this major disruption. Special me
illegal or me act me purposefully using my own sperm
instead of your biologic or you're the guy who raised
you sperm to make you is a problem for both
of us, and I would have gotten away with it
too if it wasn't for rome A Midling kids. That's

(34:51):
the antitude he has with all of it, is like,
what the fuck? No, yeah, and none of it, And
you guys are mad at me. I don't understand exist.
Some of you are dating people. Come on, it sounds
like some of you are coming to what's the problem. Yeah. Now,

(35:14):
he begged Palmer not to tell anybody, and for a
while she did keep this a secret, but doing so
aided her, and in two thousand sixteen, she sent Dr
Barwin this email quote, First, let me make clear what
I don't expect. I don't expect to suddenly be part
of the Barwin family, nor do I want to be.
I certainly don't expect any money or other forms of inheritance.

(35:34):
What I want is much simpler than that. I don't
want to feel the burden of hiding who I am,
the fullness of who I am. I expect his children
and grandchildren to know I exist, that I am connected
to them in this slightly confusing way, and that the
relationship is not my fault. It's not some threat from
an outsider. I was just born, and the nature of
my birth and my genetic relationship to them is entirely

(35:55):
from choices or mistakes that others made, totally reasonable. All
of that is insanely reasonable, considering the circumstances and what
has happened. That might be the most reasonable paragraph that's
ever been read on this show. Without that I've heard,
without a doubt. Yeah, without a doubt, that's the most

(36:16):
reasonable human thing we've heard. And it was just like,
listen what you did. I don't want anything from you.
I just need to be able to acknowledge who I
am as a human person. And he's like, hey, easy.
We think about his response. No, no, now it makes

(36:36):
me want to jump out the window already, Like when
you said, here's his response, I'm already like I don't
want to. I don't know well, and the window next
to you is the poison room, so that would be
doubly dangerous. Be dead. And then all yet, and then
we'll make sure I'm taking Barwin's response is what I'm
going to read now, so if it makes sure the
poison room doors locked. I am concerned that if this

(37:00):
becomes public, my professional credibility will be damaged. I am
so sorry that my issue. I am so sorry that
my issues are causing such an impact on you. It's
not that I don't want to let my children know
about you. It's just that I am worried about how
they will feel about me. If you plan to inform others.
My concerned is he's such a piece of ship. God,

(37:22):
I mean a clinical psychologists like tell him to come
say me, holy shit. I feel like I feel like
the I'm not a psychologist, but I feel like the
ethical response if he went to a clinical psychologist would
be for that psychologist to hit him in the face. Yeah, Oh,

(37:42):
you're the case. Come here. That's that's the one case
in the d s M. Like they line this out
years ago. Nobody's ever done it. No, it says here,
you're the only type of person I can punch. I
have to counsel serial killers, but you I can hit.
I get to punch, you get to punch it. Yeah.
I'm not done reading his response. M. If you plan

(38:07):
to inform others, my concern is how they will see me. Again,
it is not about you. You have been very understanding, reasonable, impatient,
and from what I can gather, you are a fabulous person.
I wanted to let you know why I have been delaying.
I'm still trying to come to terms with what I
have done and how my family will feel about me
if they were aware of my unintentional action. See, it's

(38:27):
not about you. The issue of who your father is
is not about you. It's about me, the guy who
conned your mother into getting my come inside here. Well,
and and he doesn't even say that he doesn't even know,
he's not even that honest. He says that the my
unintentional action, which is still like no, dude, no dude,

(38:52):
you can't start it with me, and like you're gonna
funk up my doctor thing. You're not thinking about me
or me or may here. And then also, I didn't
do this, it was an accident. We're like, well, none
of what you said, none of it. It's like, even
if you're worried about your doctor's thing, then you admit
that you're not a good doctor in the same thing. Yeah,

(39:16):
it's very frustrating now, I mean sure, I mean before
we read that, I was like, well, this guy's obvious
the narcissist where he's just like I wanna everyone from
taking my seed. And then he can't even respond without
being like, you're not even thinking about me. You're like, oh,
he's Wow. Yeah, this guy is a hardcore narcissist. And

(39:40):
by two thousand nineteen, it was clear that Dr Barwin
had been responsible for mixing up the sperm donors between
fifty one and a hundred babies, and quite possibly many
many more. For sure. Yeah, because there's a bunch of
kids like you went to that doctor. Fuck, I don't
want you. You know what, you shouldn't read up on it. Now.

(40:02):
It was also shown that he had been the donor
himself for at least eleven of those babies. More more, way, more, more,
way more. I'm I'm if I had money to bet
for on this, this would be like, yeah, there's more.
There's a lot more Barwin babies who were literal Barwin babies. Yeah. Now,
at this point it became clear that whatever had gone

(40:25):
down was no accident. Dr Barwin had purposefully impregnated women
with his sperm against their will. Now, Billy, in a
reasonable world, would you consider would you think that would
be a crime. It sounds I mean, by definition, it
sounds like, right, yeah, it's not rape. But it lives

(40:46):
in the same housing development. Okay, I understand it. It's
the same shitty gated community. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's the
same shitty gated community is um you know what's not
in the same gated community as rate Billy Wayne Davis
hopefully Hope Koke Brother that Yeah. I mean actually if

(41:08):
it's if it's a Koke Brother's ad, it might be
in that ballpark they built the gated community. That they
built the gated community, and they built it above a
leaky gas pipeline on a Native American reservation. Anyway, Thus
begins are most smoothly led into ad break of all

(41:33):
time products. Nice job, We're back. Yes, uh so, as
I kind of animated in the before the lead out,
this was not against the law. Um, nothing exactly exactly.

(41:57):
Nobody thought this would happen. I think all of the
assemblies look at each other like, I mean it should
be but yeah, ship, yeah, I haven't had this issue before.
It's like committing tax fraud in space, Like nobody quite
thought to like make sure that that was down in
the books. Yes, yes, he international waters the ship out

(42:21):
of that, didn't you. Yeah. Now. The only official come
up and that Dr Barwin suffered was a disciplinary panel
from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario. Dr
Barwin did not show up at his own hearing, denying
his victims a chance to get any kind of closure.
He just showed up at the end, right, No, he
didn't even show up. And just to think that that's
what he like, he started the hearing and then left

(42:43):
and then showed up right before it ended. That would
be true to form. I just wanted to feel like
what the Simonson was, That's all. I just wanted to
feel it. I wanted to feel the feeling of being
sent I just wanted to feel it. Yeah. I had
a hernie, Yeah, like HERNI and UT was like, is

(43:06):
he doing the marathon? Is THEO thinkking? He now? Dr
Barwin claimed that he could not make the hearing due
to unspecified medical issues, which he provided no evidence for
uh and his doctor pleaded or his lawyer pleaded no contest,
which meant that he did not dispute the facts of
the case, but also did not admit guilt. It's basically like,

(43:29):
how can I give the people I wronged the least
amount of closure? That's what he did. Yeah. Now, there
is currently a class action lawsuit against Dr Barwin in
the offing, and if it actually goes through, Dr Barwin
might wind up in a court. But even so, there
doesn't seem to be any chance of him actually facing
serious criminal penalties for his actions. See It turns out

(43:50):
that assisted human reproduction as an industry is kind of
preposterous lee unregulated pretty much everywhere on Earth. In Canada,
the organization respond for be keeping an eye on the
practice is Assisted Human Reproduction Canada, a federal regulatory body
established in two thousand six. They are supposed to keep
track of donor conceived kids and make sure people like

(44:11):
Dr Barwin don't get to impregnate numerous women in secret.
But in two thousand eight, two years after the organization's founding,
the Province of Quebec challenged the federal government's jurisdiction. The
case spent years meyern in the Canadian Supreme Court, and
during that time Health Canada was unable to actually develop
any regulations. In two thousand twelve, the agency was defunded
and responsibility for regulating fertility clinics was returned to the States.

(44:35):
So there's barely anyone keeping watch, and up until recently
there were barely any laws in Canada, certainly none aimed
at stopping someone like Normwin Barwin from using his own
sperm on donors. And this is not just a Canadian problem. Basically,
everywhere the fertility industry exists, it does so with almost
no regulation or oversight. The executive director for the Center

(44:56):
for Genetics and Society called the United States the wild
West of the utility industry. It was huge news in
two thousand fifteen when Utah, of all places, passed a
law giving donor conceived children the right to know their
genetic parents medical history. Like crazy that Utah would actually
be the first to like the state that's like, yeah,
you can sell people lead and call it a vitamin

(45:22):
that if you have four, you can do that if
you got four. Um. Now, Utah is kind of unique
in passing this law because most states don't regulate even
like don't even regulate how many children can be conceived
by a single donor. Like though that Utah did it
for some fat channel Mormon genetic thing where they're making

(45:44):
sure if I, if I was a better researcher, I
would have checked in on that. I was just happy
to see that somebody had instituted that law in the
United States and shocked that it was Utah. I'm not
sure why it was Utah, and I don't It might
just be Mormons, but it's just they're just that the
way they do government there is very interesting. So I

(46:05):
mean it might just be that, like because uh, there's
so many large families in Utah, the fertility industry is
bigger there and so they needed to start regulating it
earlier than other places. I really don't know. I think
you said it more articularly than where it was just like,
do you think it's weird Mormon shit? You know it's
got to be weird Mormons. It's Utah, right, like everything traces. Yeah, yeah,

(46:28):
you can't get you gotta mix your liquor behind a curtain,
but you can know who your biological father was. Confusing. Uh,
Now this is where we leave Dr Barwin. What I
found in my research is that he isn't so much
a bastard as one member of a species of bastards.

(46:48):
And this brings me to the story of Dr Donald Klein.
He was an Indianapolis era fertility doctor in the nineteen
seventies and nineteen eighties, the same wild and wooly days
that Dr Barwin started practicing. You want to guess where
this story goes, Billy Way, No, no, you know what
I don't. I'm gonna quote from the New York Times
here quote. Many couples sawt Dr Klein out at his

(47:11):
Indianapolis Air of Fertility clinic during the seventies and eighties.
They had children who grew up and had children of
their own with the couples did not know was that
an untold number of occasions Dr Klein was not using
the sperm of anonymous donors. He was using his own.
Through twenty three and Me and other similar genetic testing websites,
three dozen half siblings of those women have been found
three dozen. About three dozen, said Jacoba Ballard, thirty eight,

(47:33):
one of the biological daughters. She expects the number to grow.
In some instances, State prosecutors said Dr Klein even told
women that he was using their husband's sperm but provided
his own. What is the thought? Is it that doctor
thing that they get where they're like, I am, is
it some weird I think it's narcissism. And I'll ask you, well,

(47:56):
hold onto that thought, because once we get a little
bit more information, I think we can discuss this in detail,
and I think there's a pretty clear conclusion here. Um.
But I want to go through the other cases. So
there's like there's like a like you said, a species
of man that it's like, yeah, it's a whole type
of guy. Wow. Yeah don special certainly not Dr Norman Barwin.

(48:23):
Even if you think, hey, I'm just secretly impregnating all
these women, I am. No one else is doing this
ship there's like four other people. Yeah I'm doing it. Yeah,
you're like yeah, I mean I've had to deal with
that feeling just because of the existence of the dollar,
and it's nice to know that that's true with doctors
who use their own sperm as well. Yes, yes, where

(48:45):
you go to an audition and everyone looks like you
and you're like what you fuck? Yeah, that's really Uh.
That's one of the things about Los Angeles that can
drive you crazy is how he said you could be
sorted into a type yeah, or or you go down
aunditions like I went to one where it was written

(49:05):
for me like I was the guy, Like they were like,
we want Billy Wayne Davis, and then I went and
I didn't get it because someone did it better than me.
He was better Billy Wayne Davis than you, And I
was like he probably was. He probably was. They had
their look or whatever whatever company was like, yeah, that's
he's better than the real one. I mean we actually
we were planning to have you on the show a

(49:27):
lot earlier, Billy Wayne, but you know, you kind of
flubbed the audition. And I have to say, Jamie, it
was a great Billy Wayne Davis. Yeah, she's uh so.
Dr Klein is still alive, but his refused doggedly to
address any of this or to explain himself to his victims.
In December of two thousand eighteen, he played guilty to

(49:49):
two felony counts of obstruction of justice and was given
a suspended three hundred and sixty five days sentence. Now,
the only reason he received that much of a punishment,
and any kind of criminal punishment at all, was because
he lied to state investigators when he initially claimed he
hadn't used his own sperm to impregnate anyone. The fact
that he had tricked a bunch of women into burying
his genetic material was not a crime. Now, if he

(50:11):
wouldn't admitted to it would be fine. He probably would
have lost his medical license like that that stuff they
can do for it, But he wouldn't have gone. He
wouldn't have gotten a criminal sentence, yeah what, but would
it would have put him in like civil Yeah yeah, yeah.
I mean you can sue people civilly for anything, and
I think he's certainly at risk for that because he definitely,

(50:32):
like you can claim material harm for what he did,
because the ego of like not admitting it when you're
doing it, because I think they want it's like, you know,
that's a thing you're like. I think part of them,
like someone was like, hey, you can't admit you did
this because you will have zero money ever again, Yeah,
maybe that's the case. Um. Now, the state medical board

(50:55):
did bar him from holding a medical license again, but
since Dr Klein had retired in two thousand nine, this
isn't an enormous punishment. We have no way of knowing
how many of his genetic children are out there. Meanwhile,
those children have no way of knowing who their biological
father was because Dr Klein shredded all of his patient records.
Cool cool dude. In nineteen ninety two, in Virginia, a

(51:19):
fertility doctor named Cecil Jacobsen was indicted for using his
own sperm to impregnate dozens of women. Now, it was
illegal in Virginia. So Virginias, you can take some pride
in the fact that your state is way ahead of
the curve on this. He was sentenced to five years
in prison and more than a hundred and sixteen thousand
dollars in fines, but even so it still took decades

(51:41):
and more than fifty pregnancies for anyone to catch him. Now,
Jacobsen was a Brown University graduate who went on to
be the chief of reproductive genetics at George Washington University.
In the nineteen sixties, he claimed to have successfully implanted
a fertilized baboon egg into a male baboon and kept
the pregnancy viable for nearly four months. He never published
to this work, and he's probably lying about it, but

(52:02):
the fact that he considered this something to brag about
probably should have been a red flag decades earlier. Now,
I'm going to quote from a medical bag dot com
article on the man quote. By the nineteen eighties, Jacobson
had started operating a genetic center in Virginia. He proclaimed
himself a fertility specialist and began treating patients who had
difficulties getting pregnant. He used the hormone human chorionic gonado

(52:23):
gonado trope him hCG regularly, and as a form of treatment,
Jacobson would falsify pregnancies, have patients undergo ultrasounds, and then
tell them that the fetus had died. Around the third
month of pregnancy, suspicions began to arise, which reported to
local authorities. Federal investigators stepped in and came to find that,
in addition to the falsified pregnancies, Jacobson had been artificially
inseminating patients with sperm, supposedly from screen and anonymous donors.

(52:47):
The investigators determined that there was no donor program and
that Jacobson was using his own sperm to impregnate patients. Program. Yeah,
there's a program program Jacobson. Uh. It's suspected that in total,
Jacobson probably fathered as many as seventy five children with

(53:08):
his own seamen. But okay, there's another part of this
where it's like you're not actually getting laid either. No,
I don't think that's it. I don't think that's it.
I know it's not it. But it is like a
fun part of making a baby. It is the better
part of making It's way better than like you know,
glass and then putting in the thing and maybe yeah, yeah, yeah,

(53:32):
I was gonna say, when they turn out to be
Will Wheaton, but yeah, all of those other parts sucked
to now. There are many fertility doctors with stories like this.
On August two thousand, nineteen, two days before I wrote
this script, Today Magazine published an article titled their Mothers
chose donor sperm, their doctor's used their own. It tells
the story of Eve Whiley, who learned at age sixteen

(53:55):
that she'd been conceived via artificial insemination. The doctor responsible,
Kim mcmoury's, told her mother that he'd found said sperm
through a California sperm bank and believe this to be
true until she took a consumer DNA test. You've told
reporters you build your whole life on your genetic identity,
and that's the foundation. But when those bottom bricks have
been removed or altered, it can be devastating. I I

(54:15):
will say in the future, I'm going to use California
Sperm Bank as a pseudonym from my testicles, but I
think only when I'm in California like that, Yeah, I
got it from California Sperm Bank. You can be sure
of that. And I like that a lot of this
was discovered with the with the commercial commercialization of DNA testing.

(54:36):
Like the doctors are like walking to a CVS the
first time they saw like a DNA test thing and
they're like, this is not good. This ain't gonna work
well for me like that. Do you know, now, dr?
What do you think of this twenty three and me stuff?
It's a scam. It's a scam. It's bad And the
best part is it is kind of a scam. This

(54:58):
is basically the only thing it was be good for. Yeah,
and in helping catch murderers. I think, I think for
yeah stuff, it's a lot of problematic aspects, but in
this case it did a good thing. Yeah, what do
you think of twenty three and Well? I discover that
my dad is a doctor that is also the data

(55:18):
send me for other people that we know about. Yeah,
you don't hear that commercial on the park? I found
out my family comes from Norway. Now, partly as a
result of Eve's case, Texas has passed a law making
this sort of thing a crime. It is now defined
as sexual assault there So, in this one case, Texas

(55:40):
is actually an example of like a reasonable and timely
response to a clear problem. So it happened once in
Texas state history. Good for them, Good, good for them.
We should get Texas. You get a lot of ship
and deservedly so, and deservedly so, you deserve it. But hey,
good job on this one. On this one. Nailed it,

(56:01):
don't you nailed it? Yeah, don't get you nailed it?
Like the biological pair or like the people who raised
all these kids? Uh did not nail there. You know
you could see where the joke I was trying to
go for there was. Yeah, it just didn't work out.
See why you chose journalism. But I I do think

(56:23):
like yeah, like and even with the Canada thing or
the Mormon thing, it's like, I do feel like there's
probably livestock. There's a livestock reason somewhere involved in while
they're ahead of this, somebody reads this story about people
and it's like, my god, this is going to infect
the steers. Yes, that's industry, that's our industry here. It's like, yeah, No,

(56:47):
I do think there's probably something because like that's how
I know about artificial insemination is because I was raising
cattle farm and it's not as complicated a process as
people would think it is. No, no, it is not.
It is not. Although I think people would be interested
at the lengths that are gone to to stop bowls

(57:08):
from actually having sex with anything. Yes, yeah, that that's
an entertaining part of that, and it's yeah, they get
them all worked up and then they're like, hey, how
we're gonna stop and record. There's a lot of like
in the meat industry, there's a lot of like, uh,
things to be angry about in terms of an injustice,
but that should be on the list. Yes, yeah, it's

(57:30):
not as bad as like keeping animals in their own
fecal matter outside of sunlight and stuff in a cramped pin.
But it's still not cool me. They don't want those
dudes on Yeah, they are on re sons of bitches
and they're just like, oh, you're mad because that dudes
on you. No, No, I don't care. He's on my back.
They haven't let me fuck you know, why don't you?

(57:51):
For an idea of like the environment I grew up in,
my mom's favorite sport to watch was bull riding, primarily
for when the guys would get horribly injured. Of watching
those guys get fucked up by both. It's awesome. It's awesome.
It is awesome. That's what you And it's like when
that's one the whole problem with the NFL not coming forward,
just say it causes brain damage, and then they sign

(58:13):
a waiver and you get to make a bunch of money.
We know, guns kill people and it's a huge industry
in the United States. If you were just like, yeah,
football is horrible for people, do you still want to
make a hundred million dollars? People would still say yes,
I know it already and do it. Yeah. And then
when someone stops, like Andrew Luck and everybody's like what

(58:33):
is he doing, He's like, well, I think he's he
wants to enjoy his millions of dollars before his brain melts.
He just wants to remember what life is like. Yeah, yeah, god, yeah,
he knows he's got ten years left before he shoots
himself in the chest and leaves a note telling doctors
to study his brain. My brain because I'm a good person.
But this which has happened to a bunch of those guys.

(58:55):
Number one Junior say oh that you know about that,
there's other ones that have that you don't know about.
That are like this, I gotta I'm tired of being crazy. Yeah, horrible.
Thank god. I went to the football practice in college.
It was like, fuck this. I did play for a
season in high school, but I was not good at it.

(59:17):
Uh And I mostly avoided the head injuries. See that
was pretty good at it in high school, so I
could avoid the head injuries. So that was the Mine
was like, I don't like hitting people, but I like
score and touchdowns. I can say all my head injuries
in life have come from teaching special ed. I think
my dad might back that up to yeah, no, it's

(59:37):
you'll get hit in the head a lot, depending on
what type of teaching football coach, especially a teacher, I'm
sure he's like not gonna hit way more, especially now. Uh. Yeah.
Like I said, Texas passed the law and making this
a crime after the mcmoury's case, but Dr mcmoury's behavior
remains legal in forty seven American states. And I'm going

(59:59):
to quote again from today. Dr Jody Madeira, a law
professor at Indiana University, is following more than twenty cases
in the United States and abroad. They have occurred in
a dozen states, including Connecticut, Vermont, Idaho, Utah, and Nevada,
she said, as well as in England, South Africa, Germany
and the Netherlands. So many doctors use their own sperm
to impregnate women, so many fertility doctors. It's fucking crazy

(01:00:20):
how common it is. Border It is an epidemic. It's
absolutely an epidemic. Like I didn't include every case, just
the most obvious ones. I only had so much research time.
I can't So is it like a funny thing they're doing,

(01:00:41):
like where they're like, I said, let's get through the
rest of this and then we'll talk about what the
funk we think is going You keep saying that, and
then yeah, there's just a lot more fucking deeper than
I could ever believe. So I'm like, yeah, we're almost glad,
We're almost there. And then you're like, no, there's forty
eight more dudes that are doing this. Yes, I have
a hundred and twelve pages more to go through. That

(01:01:04):
case in the Netherlands was probably fertility specialist Yawn Carbot.
He was confirmed by DNA testing to a fathered fifty
six children with women who distinctly did not intend to
have his sperm inside of them. Carbot's clinic closed in
two thousand nine, but much of this activity had happened
decades prior, and at least one local attorney doubted whether
or not he'd ever done anything legally improper. Quote thirty

(01:01:25):
years ago, people looked at things in very different ways.
Carbot could have been an anonymous donor. We don't know
that there was no registration system at the time. As
a good lawyer right there, that is a good law
good lawyer, solid lawyer. Yeah, I'm impressed, but I invited
my barbecue. Yeah. Now, it's worth noting that there are

(01:01:46):
reasons some doctors may have used their own sperm outside
of narcissism or just some bizarre cank or I should say,
in addition to narcissism, up until the late nineteen eighties,
frozen sperm technology was still quite primitive. Many doctors might
have justified using their own fresh sperm because they knew
it would work better than the alternative. No one back
in nineteen saw home DNA testing kits is very likely,

(01:02:08):
and I think this might explain Dr Barwin's reputation as
the baby god. Other fertility doctors in Ottawa probably didn't
use their own semen in patients, so they relied on
the frozen stuff and had lower success rates. Dr Barwin's
marked success was a direct consequence of the fact that
he was fine lying to people about whose semen they
were getting. And this Billy Wayne Davis brings me to

(01:02:29):
the story of Berthold Wisner and his wife Mary Barton.
They were very first for the end, and I don't
like it some of the in there. I'm just gonna
this is definitely part of a horror movie. They were
among the earliest pioneers in the fertility field. They started

(01:02:50):
a clinic in London in the nineteen forties and over
the years they took part in more than fifteen hundred
successful conceptions. Now, at the time they told it's that
all of their sperm donors came from a small collection
of their friends who were all geniuses and accomplished academics.
Come in this house, Well fuck, they're all geniuses. Now

(01:03:13):
you want to guess how many of these babies were his?
Every one of them? No, no, it's not that bad.
Roughly one third of them. So about six hundred children
are estimated to have been conceived to be a Wisener sperm. Now,
most of these children will probably never learn the truth
since it took so many decades for anyone to realize
what was going on. It's actually impossible for anyone to

(01:03:35):
know how many children Wisener had or how many of
those kids may have wind up dating or marrying each
other and forgot about that part. That's so funny, Yeah,
that this this might explain a little bit of white
English people are so weird. Um, but you know, no
way to know it's well, there's a it's a cocktail
over there now. In two thousand eighteen, a Queen's couple

(01:03:59):
finally succeeded in conceiving a child through in vitro fertilization,
but when the mother gave birth in March of this year,
she and her husband were shocked to find out that,
unlike them, their children were not Asian. According to Today
dot Com, the couple reported they had spent over a
hundred thousand dollars at c H, a fertility center in California,
for attempts at IVF. According to a lawsuit filed last week,
red flags began to pop up throughout the pregnancy. A

(01:04:21):
sonogram showed the women was carrying twin boys. If the
couple had not used male embryos. When they contacted the
clinic about it, doctor simply told them the sonogram was incorrect.
Following the birth, the couple was shocked to see that
the babies they were told were formed using both of
their genetic material did not appear to be. The lawsuits
stated the babies were not related to either of their
parents or to each other. The couple relinquished custody of
the children. Now it is unclear who the parents were

(01:04:45):
in that case. We have no idea. It is entirely
possible that this case is not at all the result
of a shady doctor wanting to spread his seed or
anything like that. It may have just been a funk
up due to the fact that in two thousand nineteen,
nobody really cares about making sure this piece of the
medical field of gids by the same rules that other
parts of medicine that don't involve semen do. Dove Fox,

(01:05:05):
a professor of law at the University of San Diego,
provided this explanation to today. Fertility centers, and there are
almost five hundred of them in the United States today,
operate free of almost any regulation at all. Fox told
NBC News there's no federal law, no state law, no
enforced professional guideline that enforces requirements that licenses these facilities
in the way that they label, or diagnose or handle sperm,

(01:05:26):
eggs and embryos that result in the creation of people.
In fertility medicine, it's very different than any other field,
where we regulate very closely what's called never events. These
are major avoidable mistakes, things like blood transfusion on the
wrong person, or a surgery on the wrong body part
or the wrong patient. There we require mandatory disclosure and
we figure out what went wrong and how to fix it.

(01:05:46):
We have nothing like that for what you might call
never events in reproductive technology. So that's neat. I I mean,
I might stop doing comedy and just get into Dr
Billy's bag making bungle to Billy's baby clinic. They come
from a California sperm bank. It sure does. He only

(01:06:10):
say he can say five or six couples the day
until he's about forty five, and then he's going to retire.
I think, oh Jesus, so yeah. My thinking on why
these guys do it. I think you've got to mix
the two kinds of doctors and fertility medicine. You have
good doctors who choose to go into fertility medicine and

(01:06:32):
do their best, and sometimes they succeed, and sometimes they
fail because using frozen sperm is harder than using fresh
sperm and it's a difficult field. And then you have
guys like Dr Barwin, who are not actually great doctors,
but who, because they're narcissists, want to be seen as
the best, and who realized at a certain point, I
can be the best fertility doctor if I just use

(01:06:53):
my own fresh come all the time. Yeah. No, that
I mean that's a good business decision to more than
any Yeah, it's a great That's why he became the
baby god. Yeah. I think it's the same with most
of these guys. They just wanted to be seen as great.
I don't like. I don't think it's a kink for
most of them. I don't think it's about wanting to
spread their seed. I think they want to be seen
as great doctors. And literally, the easiest way in medicine

(01:07:15):
to be seen as a great doctor without actually being
good at medicine is to be a cheating fertility doctor.
Until recently, Yeah, well especially the marathon guy, like cheating
was not that was like he was all about results.
He wanted to seem like the best. Yeah, yeah he did. Yeah,
he had a I would say probably insecurity, I would say,

(01:07:38):
for sure, which is a weird thing to lead to
wanting more children. And I don't think he cared about that.
You just think it was well And I guess you're right,
because it's not even that personal. When you're in the
lab doing the thing. It's probably you're just thinking about like, oh,
this will make these people happy, and then I'll get

(01:08:01):
more money and then they'll bring more people. Yeah. Yeah,
I suspect it's something like that, or they're I mean,
they're all smart enough to realize, like maybe they're all
the hanging out and he's like, yeah, they all. I
mean it's tough because you freeze them. Sometimes they live.
Most of the time they don't. So it would be
like one smartass doctor, you know, they're playing golf and

(01:08:21):
he's like, be easier, butters jacked off himself into it,
and then the other guy was like, okay, huh easier.
He says that as he's like surreptitiously picking up his
ball and dropping it ten feet forward, we're just like
kicking it with his foot. He was like kicking it
with his foot. Jesus Christ, He's like, look thirty six again. Yeah.

(01:08:50):
I had an interesting journey writing this episode because I
like started looking at Dr Barwin and I did a
few hours of research, and then I realized that his
story on its own just wasn't enough for a full episode,
and I was starting to be like, oh God, damn it,
I gotta start over again. And then, like by accident googling,
I just came up across another doctor like that, and
another and another and another. It's like, oh my god,

(01:09:11):
this is like a whole thing. Yeah, no, I had Well,
let's the thing, Like you hear those stories like every
now and then it's like, hey, some fertility doctor did
the thing, and then it wasn't until you're like then
there was another and then oh they've never put those
stories together well, and nobody's there's not a single like,
nobody's keeping track of this ship. Nobody ever thought it

(01:09:32):
would be a problem. So there's just no there's no
infrastructure set up to make sure it's a fucking it
doesn't happen. It is a weird sca because for a
long time there were no victims. Quote unquote yeah, because
everyone got what they wanted seemingly until the baby grew up.
I was like, hey, oh come mom, Harry and you

(01:09:55):
guys aren't. Yeah, and then and then they walked down
this c V as twenty d n a oh, and
then it all fell apart. That's fascinate because I don't
think they thought. I think some of them knew, but
I think some of them thought was like, this is
one of those things where it's like everyone kind of
guess what they want. Yeah, but yep, they didn't. They

(01:10:19):
did not. Billy told you motherfucker's karma. So Billy, how
you feel today? You know? We asked a question at
the beginning of this as to whether or not these
were fake doctors, and they're definitely had m d s.
But I do still feel the same thing as going

(01:10:39):
on in their heads as is going on with the
other fake doctors we talked about where it's an ego thing.
They want to be seen as great doctors, and in
these guys this case, they did get m d S,
so they went further, but they were still fundamentally the
same kind of grifter, I believe, Yeah, if not more dangerous, Yeah,
because they're more willing to put on the airs in

(01:11:02):
a way that the other ones weren't. Yeah, and I think,
like the untold story with like Dr Barwin, like it
might be that all of the baby mishaps in his
fertility clinic are the least evil he resulted in his
career because he was working as a gynecologist for years
while clearly unqualified to do it. Like who knows how
much cervical cancer he missed or like whatever, like other

(01:11:25):
funk ups, you can funk up as a gynecologist who
can't pass the test to be a gynecologist. Like, I'm
sure there's more darkness to Barwin's story in particular. I
think there's probably more darkness to every one of them, because,
like you said, like if they're willing to do this
shortcut for this, they're not looking at everything they showed
like a real doctor. Yeah. It's like there's dermatologist in

(01:11:49):
l a that are just you go and you're like,
you're not a real dermatologist. You're just injecting shipped into
rich ladies faces. Oh yeah, you're just shooting stuff into
people's lips. Yeah, And then they're like uh huh, yeah,
do you want you want your weight card too, and
you're like, I gotta get out of here, but yes,
I do want how much is it less than fifty dollars?

(01:12:11):
Because the other fake doctor I go to chach I
just fifty dollars. Doctor wrinkled Webcoat says it's uh see,
I'm so toward because I love the whimsy of the
I wish the fake medical marijuana industry had never changed. Well,

(01:12:32):
there was a it's a real industry. Yeah, that started
for like really helping people, and then Southern California really
took it and we're like, you know, okay, yeah, yeah,
it's a medicine. Yeah, and then yeah and then yeah,
that's what happened because it started in San Francisco where
they really gave a ship about gay people that were dying.

(01:12:52):
Oh yes, yes, yes, yes. And there's one of my
very favorite marijuana clinics in San Francisco. Um is like
name after this guy who was uh like the partner
of the guy who opened it, and the dude like
the shop is I don't I don't remember the name
of the shop. I don't think it's that, but like
the dude, the dude who opened the shop, his partner

(01:13:14):
died of aids, and like he opened the shop because
he had these dark memories of having to like go
buy weed from shady drug dealers to like try and
like help his lovers like appetite and like fight his
pain and stuff. And he's like, it was just so
demeaning to have to do that for you're a sick person.
You love that. I don't want anyone to go through that.
So yes, I don't mean to say that, like medical
marijuana isn't a thing. I just I love how bullshit

(01:13:37):
Southern California's medical marijuana industry got. It was beautiful, so beautiful.
You're just like I can see the ocean when I
got my card. That's hilarious. I can see the ocean.
The doctor has a framed picture of the Mona Lisa
smoking a blunt on his wall, and it is nailed
to the wall next to all the symptoms of what

(01:13:58):
you can say to get it. That's my I was like,
which one do you got? And I was like, it
was great, but I do. I mean, there's a lot
of my thought is like I'm about to get a vasectomy.
Um so now I'm way more a little worried than
I was because oh yeah, because you just think like, oh,

(01:14:23):
I gotta find the right doctor now, because you can't
just be like, yeah, you gotta be careful about that ship.
Uh damn it. It was just a little more homework
than I was gonna do. I was just gonna go like,
who who did that? Now I have to look into
it and be like, hey, you don't have a history
of fucking this up, do you? Yeah? I mean yeah,

(01:14:43):
it's not a bad idea to look into with any doctor.
And it's probably unfair that I'm going to make the
title of this be all fertility doctors are bastards, But
that is going to be the title of this episode.
And if you want me to revise my opinion of
your industry, for hility doctors, lobby for there to be
any kind of regulation of the industry whatsoever, any kind

(01:15:08):
just a law saying you can't trick women into using
your sperm, or you have to go give your sperm
at a sperm bank. You can't just skip that step
and do it at the thing. Yes, if you are
a doctor, fertility doctor, and you give your sperm to
a sperm bank and then somebody uses it, fine, yes, yes,

(01:15:29):
of course, of course, yes, you need that one step.
I think that's an important step that they all that
the people seem to have a problem with I I'm
really wondering what it was like to work with Barwin,
because I'm betting at least a few of his employees
had stories of like, oh yeah, every time after an insemination,

(01:15:50):
he just goes and takes a nap. He gets real quiet,
doesn't want to talk to anybody, usually smoke a cigarette.
He had a process and it minded me of my husband.
Uh why is he breathing heavy? So Billy, Yes, you

(01:16:11):
want to plug your plug doubles. Uh sure, bwd tour
dot com. Um, I'm in dates, uh more and more,
and then you can get my record Billy Wayne Davis
live at Thurdmin Records. Just you can download it or
you can whatever. It's just you know, google Billy Wayne
Davis and all that ship comes up. How about that?

(01:16:32):
Google Billy Wayne Dave. I'm on Twitter, I'm on Instagram.
I think I'm on Facebook, but I don't really care
about that. Just google him. He's not like me. He
doesn't share a name with the guy who produced Godfather.
That's awesome, though, is it? Yes? That dude is as
far as those dudes go pretty rad. That's a ramy
dude to share a name with. I will tell you

(01:16:53):
there was a sense of pride I got when I
finally started showing up on the first page of Google
results with him. That took a lot of time in
my career. Yeah. He just really put in the put
in the work. Yeah. I mean I would say this
like the way I've been on the Paramount a lot
a couple of times just to do Hollywood meetings. Um there,

(01:17:14):
it's the dumbest thing you there. They just want to say, hey,
who are you? And you're like you don't care, and
they're like, no, we don't get out of here. But
you walk by Robert Evans office and you know, people
have like a sign there their little company. His is
this cool steel sign, but it's his signature, and I
was like, that's awesome. It really like it was like
that's a fucking g move. It really was. I would

(01:17:36):
just walk back and I was like, tip of the
hat that guy, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's uh, you know,
he's uh, he's the guy that he is. And he's
also a hundred years old and he still has in
office at the Paramount lot that's crazy too. I am
going to be now that he's stepping down, I am
going to apply for a job at Paramount because they
are short of Robert Evans. You're like, hey, you already

(01:17:58):
have that office. I guess it's got my name. Yeah.
My my my job will be consuming my body weight
in cocaine and green lighting movies. Um. Kind of does sound. Yeah,
it sounds like the best job ever. I um yeah.
And he's like, I've impregnated more ladies than those doctors.

(01:18:18):
That's true, and every one of them knew exactly what
they were getting into. Yeah, there was no lab involved. No,
the kids stayed in that picture. Yeah. Uh. Special edited
that documentary for a full circle thing. That's cool. Good documentary.

(01:18:40):
Speaking of good documentaries, you can find this podcast on
the internet at behind the Bastards dot com um, where
we'll have the sources for this episode. If you need
to prove to somebody else that fertility doctors are an
untrustworthy lot. Uh, you can find me on Twitter at
I right, Okay. You can find this podcast on Twitter
and Instagram and at that estards pod. Um. You can

(01:19:02):
find buy t shirts at t public dot com. Behind
the Bastards um. And you cannot find Sophie my producer
on the internet, um because she lives in a cave
and only comes down once every century when her unique
talents are needed to save the world from the devastation
of the Poison Room. Pretty noble, mhm. So if you

(01:19:24):
got a line you wanna you want to end us on. Now,
that's a good line, A solid, solid Sophie work. All right, guys.
Episode done.

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