We recognise that the practices described below took place in a different time, when donor conception was poorly regulated and largely hidden from public scrutiny. However, it is vital to share these stories – not to assign blame retrospectively, but to acknowledge the very real and lasting impact they have had on the lives of donor conceived people.
While these accounts are anecdotal, they are grounded in lived experience, corroborated by emerging DNA evidence, and should not be dismissed or buried. These stories speak to a broader truth: that the choices made by professionals decades ago continue to shape our identities, our health, and our understanding of family today.
The Unethical Practices of the Bridgett Mason Clinic
Dr Bridgett Mason ran a private donor conception clinic on Weymouth Street, London in the 1980s, later moving to Harley Street to become the London Women’s Clinic in 1990. There have been various reports of the unethical practices used by Dr Mason by nurses working there at the time and through recent DNA discoveries.
In the 1980s, it is reported that the sperm donors used were exclusively medical students, recruited through notices put up in medical schools and incentivised through payment. The clinic then relied on these cash-strapped students’ honesty in their screening process, taking only minor blood tests for Syphilis, Gonorrhoea and Hepatitis B before relying solely on the student’s anecdotal medical and family histories.
It has also been reported by a nurse working at the clinic that no preparation of the semen samples or quarantine requirements were observed. This quarantine period is essential to allow time for certain infections, such as HIV and Hepatitis B and C, to be detectable in blood tests. Disregarding such requirements flagrantly neglects to adequately screen for such health dangers.
An article written by a donor conceived person conceived at the Dr Bridgett Mason clinic was published in The Telegraph in March 2023,[1] calling out the clinic’s unethical practices. The author, who remains anonymous, had found eleven half-siblings through DNA-testing websites but suspects the number is closer to 400 after connecting with the sperm donor her parents used to create her, who admitted donating up to three times a week for several years. This is despite Dr Mason’s claim that she would limit the number of children per donor to twenty in a Granada TV documentary.
A nurse working at the clinic has confirmed these suspicions, admitting that successful donors would continue to be used until they ceased to be students and disappeared, or wished to stop donating for any other reason.
Alongside her profitable donor conception practice, Dr Mason also trialled new ultrasound egg retrieval techniques in partnership with the King’s College School of Medicine Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. She provided all of the funding for this, using her patients to test this new method of egg retrieval.
This shows the complicit role such well-known and trusted institutions played in such outrageously unethical practices. Did these ‘scientists’ ever stop to think of the human cost to their research, and the people born as a result?
[1] ‘I was fathered by a super sperm donor – and I might have hundreds of siblings’, The Telegraph (1 March 2023) https://www.telegraph.co.uk/family/relationships/fathered-super-sperm-donor-might-have-hundreds-siblings/
Leave a Reply