ΤΗΕ FAMILY ΜΑΝ

Dr. Norman Barwin used the wrong sperm-and sometimes his own-to impregnate patients. Now the children he created want answers.

- Courtney Shea

Kat Palmer was in Grade 9 biology when she began to doubt everything. The day's lesson was on basic genetics and her teacher explained that the odds of two blue-eyed parents giving birth to a brown-eyed child were extremely remote. When she got home, Palmer broached the topic with her mother, Janet, who always knew this moment was coming. In the late 1980s, Janet and Kat's father, Lyon, had wanted, very badly, to have a baby, but biology refused to cooperate. The Palmers, who lived in Ottawa, were thrilled to book an appointment with Dr. Norman Barwin, a local fertility specialist known as the "Baby God." Out of a selection of possible donors, the Palmers chose a German-Irish medical student who played cello. Kathryn Rose Palmer was born on January 31, 1991 with coffee-bean eyes, a thick tuft of dark hair, and a determined jawline that everyone said looked like Lyon's.

Kat and Lyon had always been close. So while she was shaken by her mother's revelation, she decided this wouldn't fundamentally change her relationship with the man who raised her. At the time, she didn't have much interest in learning anything more about the sperm donor. Mostly she didn't think of him at all, though she did start to make little connections: her love of the performing arts and her talent as a musician (Kat would later study at Victoria's Canadian College of Performing Arts) must come from her cello-playing bio-dad. "I had no idea that I was building my identity around a lie," she now says.

A lie that, once uncovered, revealed a decades-long deception. It wasn't until 2014 that the Palmers learned Janet was one of more than 100 women who had been impregnated at Barwin's clinic with the wrong sperm. In some cases, the specimens came from men who were not the agreed-upon donor; in other cases, from the Baby God himself.