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On June 1, 1990, Davina Dixon and Dan Dixon welcomed their daughter, Rebecca, into the world. They’d fought for her for several years now, failing several times to conceive a child on their own, and were only successful after they employed the help of “baby god,” Dr. Norman Barwin, one of Canada’s leading fertility doctors at the time.
The family had no suspicions of malpractice. They trusted Dr. Barwin with their lives and the lives of their potential children. It never occurred to them that Dr. Barwin would betray them in such a terrible way.
26 years later, as Davina browsed Facebook, she saw a post that said, “it was unusual for two individuals with blue eyes to give birth to a child with brown eyes.”
Immediately, Davina’s concern was sparked. She and Dan both had brown eyes – but Rebecca’s eyes were blue.
Another medical hint that made Davina take pause was the fact that Rebecca had long suspected she was sensitive to gluten and had celiac disease. Neither she nor Dan had any history of this in their families, but these traits were generally passed through genetic lines.
That was when they went to the family doctor, who advised the entire family to figure out their blood types.
Dan Dixon has type AB blood. Rebecca has O-positive. There was no way Dan could be her biological father.
As the Dixons prepared to file a lawsuit against Dr. Barwin, they heard that five other women were also accusing Barwin of giving them the wrong sperm during their IVF procedures. For years, Barwin hadn’t been giving his female patients the right sperm for which they’d asked.
Davina “was furious” when she discovered. For Dan, the experience left him “in tears.
“I was in tears because that meant for sure she was not my child. We had no idea whose child she was, but she was not my child. And I just went to bed and cried,” he admitted.
Rebecca, though initially she felt “disassociated from [her] body and [her] face,” has gradually accepted herself again. Despite all the pain and agony her family was going through, she found great solace in discovering her half sibling, Kat Palmer, a woman who’d been born just a year after her.
Kat reciprocates these feelings exactly, "This is what I wanted all along, to find a half-sibling. She's great! I didn't think we would be as close as we've become."
The Dixon family is currently pressing charges against Dr. Barwin, whose DNA will soon be made available for concerned parties to test against it.
In spite of the mounting evidence against him, Dr. Barwin has yet to comment on the allegations, and these accusations have yet to be confirmed by a court. Check back in to see how this case progresses.
