Mary Barton

Mary Barton (1 March 1905 – 1990) was a British obstetrician who, in the 1930s, founded one of the first fertility clinics in England to offer donor insemination. Throughout her career, Barton studied infertility and conception. Her pioneering research and practice were inspired by experience as a medical missionary in India, where she saw the harsh treatment of childless women.

At the time, infertility was widely believed to be the woman's fault. Barton understood that both men and women could be infertile. Both the identification of the male as an infertile partner and the introduction of treatments that used "instrumental insemination"

In one of her research papers on fertility and conception, Barton reports successfully treating over 1,000 women using AID, 600 cases between 1944 and 1954 and another 431 women from 1955 to the end of December 1962.

Barton's second husband, sex researcher Bertold Wiesner, is believed to have been in charge of recruiting sperm donors for Barton's clinic. and of a play by Maud Dromgoole.

Early life and marriages

Mary (née Worthington) was born in Lowestoft, Suffolk, in a family of several generations of surgeons and doctors. She attended Norwich High School for Girls from 1915 to 1923, and in October 1923 she commenced studies at the London School of Medicine for Women. She received her Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery from the University of London in 1929.

She married Douglas Barton, a doctor 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. They divorced in 1939; she retained his name for the rest of her professional career.

Mary Barton married Austrian physiologist Bertold Paul Wiesner in 1943. They had a son, Jonathan, and a daughter, Ruth.

Early career 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. and in Wimpole Street in the 1960s.

Barton also worked at a fertility clinic at the Royal Free Hospital, a significant teaching hospital which became part of the newly formed National Health Service in 1948. It is likely that this was a "clinic" shared with colleagues. Her private clinic, on the other hand, operated outside of the NHS. Barton's second husband, biologist and physiologist Bertold Wiesner, was associated with the Royal Northern Hospital, as was genito-urinary surgeon Kenneth Walker.

Controversial nature of insemination

In 1945 Barton, Walker, and Wiesner published a paper about artificial insemination in the British Medical Journal. The main focus of the article was artificial insemination by husband, used in cases of impotence, failure to ejaculate during intercourse, and female dyspareunia (painful intercourse). They also noted that donor sperm had been used in rare cases of male sterility or to avoid hereditary disease. It was argued that artificial insemination was a form of adultery.

Artificial human insemination was seen as posing social and legal threats to the institution of marriage and the status of children, not least due to secrecy and deception around a child's paternity. The commission noted that children of donors might intermarry and commit incest without knowing that they were closely genetically related, with genetic risks to their offspring. Another fear was that preferential choice of male children might cause a gender imbalance in society. The commission called unsuccessfully for AID to be made a criminal offense. It was chaired by Charles Duncombe, 3rd Earl of Feversham Blackford had moved to make artificial insemination by donor illegal, as being a form of adultery, but in the end he withdrew his motion. He stated that his second objective, a full debate on the topic, had been achieved.

Others who read the Feversham Committee's report considered that, far from reflecting a full debate, it was lacking in necessary factual background,

The Wand Report worried that donors might have "absurd and inflated opinions of [their] own worth and ability", and be attracted by pride, personal power, and freedom from responsibility for progeny. Another major donor was neuroscientist Derek Richter, who may have fathered more than a hundred babies.

It is unclear whether Barton knew that much of the sperm used came from her husband. She kept records of donors identified with code names. Documentary filmmaker Barry Stevens has 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". Mary Barton and Bertold Wiesner likely believed that after the destruction of the clinic's records, the parentage of the children conceived at the clinic would be untraceable. They could not have foreseen the implications of contemporary research into the structure of DNA. The increasing availability of consumer genetic tests has made the anonymity of sperm donation practically impossible.

Laws regulating human artificial insemination were eventually introduced, but not until Britain's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act of 1990. Availability and quality of donor sperm continue to be concerns.

Barton died in 1990.