Cover story
She’s a leading consultant in women’s health with strong views on her patient’s rights, wife of the Belfast surgeon Jim Dornan and glamorous step-mum to heartthrob Hollywood star Jamie. We catch up with the amazing
DR SAMINA DORNAN
The top gynaecologist tells us how she found love and weighs into the abortion debate Interview by Una Brankin
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he’s the most feminine of feminists, possibly the most glamorous of obstetricians, and the cherished step-mum to a Hollywood heart-throb. Her husband has spoken of how lucky he was to find her, after his first wife died at 50, and her patients praise her ante-natal care in loving terms. So, one might expect Dr Samina Mahsud Dornan MD MRCOG to be mightily impressed by herself. But she’s the opposite. Not only does she care deeply about her patients, she worries about the rest of us women here, whom she feels are being denied their sexual and reproductive rights. (She even offers to help an acquaintance of mine when she hears that his wife has cancer.) And she is as close to her husband’s three children as any birth mother, evidently thrilled to bits over the phenomenal success of the
8 Northern Woman
Photographs by Brian Morrison youngest, the now world-famous Jamie Dornan. “I’m very, very proud of him, and also sad for him,” she reflects. “It may be a strange thing to say but I often feel how wonderful it would be if his mum was alive to see all this. You can never replace a mother, no matter how good a parent you are.” She’s speaking from personal experience, having lost her Persian mother, a former fashion designer who died at 30 from septicaemia, following a routine operation. “My mum was beautiful, slim and tall, and I missed her a lot,” she adds. “I have that in common with Jim’s kids, although they were mostly grown-up when I met them first.” Now in her late forties, the charismatic medic is looking back at that time - around the turn of the millennium -after a long week at work as a consultant obstetrician & gynaecologist in specialist maternal fetal medicine at the Royal Maternity Hospital, and at her private
practice on Belfast’s Lisburn Road. Relaxing in the luxurious home she shares in Cultra with Jim Dornan – widely known as ‘the baby doctor’ throughout his obstetrics career - she is warm, with an easy, hearty laugh, and extremely attractive: she has prominent curving cheekbones and beautiful exotic eyes, courtesy of her Middle-Eastern parentage. Born in Kohat in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan in the late 60s, her father, a retired civil engineer and politician, hails from South Waziristan in Afghanistan. She met the suave Jim, now 68, at a medical conference in Dublin, after a few years working in Cork and Limerick in the late 1990s. “My uncle had encouraged me to come to Ireland after I qualified - he said the Irish were friendly and supportive,” she recalls in deep tones and that peculiar, yet appealing, eastmeets-west accent. “I arrived in Cork one winter night in the late nineties and I must confess I