Submitted by Joanna Johnson on Tue, 26/02/2019 - 14:33
Cambridge scholar and fertility historian Dr Yuliya Hilevych was on BBC Woman's Hour this week discussing 'Mary’s Babies', a fictional play based on the true story of Mary Barton, a fertility treatment pioneer who set up a ground-breaking fertility clinic in London alongside her husband in the 1930s. The real clinic’s practices were controversial at the time and kept secret, with all records of donors destroyed in the early 1960s. It is now thought that Mary’s husband, Bertold Weisner, fathered around 1,000 babies himself.
Talking about Mary Barton ignites current debates over artificial insemination in Britain as the subject brings up issues of genetics, heritage and family, the interplay between those things and how they affect all of us.