Mary Barton (obstetrician)

She was born in Lowestoft, Suffolk, the daughter of several generations of surgeons and doctors.

She married Dr Douglas Barton, who was based in Dera Ismail Khan, a city in what was then British India's Northwest Frontier Province, and is now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in Pakistan. The couple practised in a missionary hospital.[3]

The couple divorced in 1939; she retained his name for the rest of her professional career. She married physiologist Bertold Paul Wiesner in 1943. They had a son, Jonathan Wiesner.

Mary Barton and her first husband were medical missionaries in pre-partition India, then still ruled by Britain. She witnessed the way in which women would be punished or even killed for being childless. At the time, it was taboo to suggest that it might be the husband, and not the wife, who was infertile- not only on the Indian subcontinent but also in the United Kingdom.[3] Barton understood that both men and women could be infertile.

The Royal Free Hospital's site in Gray's Inn Road, as Barton would have known it.

She returned to London and established a fertility clinic, pioneering Artificial Insemination by Donor for married couples unable to conceive a child due to male infertility. The practice was medically ground-breaking, helping women conceive 1,500 babies,[1] nicknamed the 'Barton Brood'.[3] Because these services were new, there were no medical or legal regulations. Clinic records appear to have been destroyed owing to the social taboos and this lack of legal regulation of the work.[4]

While there had been successful artificial insemination births documented during the 19th century,[3] the practice was not widely accepted as ethical in Britain, even when used for the breeding of farm animals.[3] After the Bartons published a paper about their practice in the British Medical Journal, the Archbishop of Canterbury labelled it 'the work of Beelzebub'.[3]

Although people refer to the 'Barton Clinic’, Dr Barton did not have a ‘clinic’ as such, but practised from a single consulting room, plus an office for her medical secretary, Miss Gwen Jenkins, who worked with her for some 30 years. Bertold Wiesner had his own consulting room. The Barton clinic"was in the Harley Street area of London, first in Portland Place and then in Wimpole Street.

Dr Barton also worked one day a week at the Royal Free Hospital, a significant teaching hospital which had become part of the newly formed National Health Service in 1948. It is likely that this was in a ‘clinic' shared with colleagues. Her private clinic, on the other hand, continued outside of the NHS.

In a context of the social taboo around the subject of infertility and the lack of a statutory legal framework at that time for such work, Dr Barton insisted on 'total secrecy' about the service she offered, telling the parents they should 'never let their children find out how they had been conceived or identify the donors'.[3]

The Barton clinic charged significant fees to their patients,[2] claiming to have helped many of the 'upper classes' and ‘peers of the realm’.[2]

Mary Barton stated she only took people who were perceived to be 'above average' and from 'intelligent stock'.

"I matched race, colouring and stature and all donors were drawn from intelligent stock. I wouldn’t take a donor unless he was, if anything, a little above average. If you are going to do it [create a child] deliberately, you have got to put the standards rather higher than normal." Some commentators have argued that her actions were 'well-meaning', as there was a 'stigma of infertility and AID at the time',[3]

In a paper in the British Medical Journal, Barton and fellow authors Kenneth Walker and Wiesner explained that they used a 'small panel of donors', as sperm donors, who in reality were associates they considered of 'intelligent stock'.[1][2][5] though it is suspected that many of the babies were conceived using sperm from Wiesner himself.[1] It is unclear whether Barton knew that much of the sperm used was from her husband or associates such as neuroscientist Derek Richter (who it is understood to have fathered more than a hundred babies), but it is unlikely she was ignorant of these facts, as she kept records of donor fathers identified with code names. Documentary filmmaker Barry Stevens stated 'it's possible he [Bertold Wiesner] didn't tell his wife and she believed the donations were coming from a lot of different men'.[3] Regardless, as a scientist specialising in fertility (among other areas), Wiesner would have been aware that there were some risks created by his fathering so many children.

The clinic was one of the first of its kind to offer artificial insemination. The clinic helped women conceive an unknown number of babies, but possibly as many as 1,500, the majority of whom came from perhaps only a few progenitors.[1]

Dr Mary Barton and Bertold Wiesner could not have known of the implications of contemporary research into the structure of DNA, and likely believed that after the destruction of the records, their actions would be untraceable.