http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/adopting-a-determined-approach-to-an-incredible-life-2419347.html

By Donal Lynch

Sunday November 14 2010

Midtown Manhattan. A group of six old friends gather in a quiet corner of The Perfect Pint Irish pub. With their shopping bags and warm embraces they could perhaps be tourists, but they are not.

The plastic paddy iconography on the pub’s walls is ironic for these people have a shared history: Americans now, they each carry Irish baggage. As children they were all farmed out from mother-and-baby homes to American adoptive parents, and as adults faced “the same long path of misinformation and stonewalling” as they tried to find out where they really came from. Now they meet regularly here in Manhattan. They are a kind of family to each other. “We share each other’s wall,” one of them tells me.

Mari (pronounced Mary) Steed usually comes away from these meetings feeling emboldened. These friends know what she has gone through and will provide her with the moral support she needs as she begins the long legal struggles ahead. As a child, the now-50-year-old says, she was a victim of medical experiments carried out in the Bessboro Mother and Baby Home in Co Cork, in which she spent almost the first two years of her life.

She claims that researchers from Burroughs Wellcome, one of the corporate predecessors of pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline, used her and other children as human guinea pigs in vaccine trials. Mari cites medical records given to her by the Sacred Heart Sisters, who ran the home. The tests were to establish the effectiveness of vaccines for tetanus, diphtheria and whooping cough. Mari calls the ethics of the trials “abhorrent”.

Evidence of these vaccination trials, which Mari discovered when she asked for her own medical records, was examined but ultimately discarded by the Laffoy Commission into child abuse (the now-elderly doctors who allegedly administered the vaccines successfully obtained a court order preventing any investigation going ahead).

Now, through a Dublin solicitor, Mari and others have begun phase two: a civil action against the Department of Health and Children, The Sacred Heart Order and GlaxoSmithKline. The Sisters and Glaxo have claimed they cannot comment on the actions since they have received no legal notice of them (however Mari herself has received a letter addressing the issue from one of the nuns). The Department of Health and Children also declined to comment for this story.

Definitive answers as to what exactly the arrangement was between the medical researchers and the nuns now lie in a locked records room at the Department. It will take what will probably be a protracted legal battle to open the files up and have the relationship between the medical researchers and the religious order fully examined. But then a quest to seek out the truth does not deter Mari.

Articulate, calm and determined she has spent what seems like her entire life seeking difficult answers. Growing up in Philadelphia in the Sixties, she “didn’t look like anyone”. She had dark hair and dark eyes; her parents were fair and “Irish looking”. When her little brother was brought home they took the opportunity to tell her that he came from the same place she did: a mother-and-baby home in Ireland. As a child this seemed like fairly irrelevant information but as she got older they told her more of the story. There had been a seven-year waiting list to adopt a child in the United States, they explained. Her father, who was first-generation Irish, had heard of a distant cousin who had adopted an Irish child from Bessboro.

Mari’s adoptive parents had had to sign the infamous “McQuaid document” — named after Archbishop McQuaid — in which they had to swear that they had not “shirked natural parenthood”. Her adoptive mother had been mortified by this but badly wanted a child. The whole process struck her parents as absurdly conservative but as Mari grew older they would be forced to confront some of their own entrenched Catholic values.

When she was in her late teens Mari fell pregnant to a boy she had been going out with for two years. Despite the fact that she was in a relationship and almost an adult legally her adoptive parents were horrified and wanted her to give up the child for adoption. The option of abortion was muttered but never seriously considered.

“This was a time of huge change in the US but certain attitudes still prevailed,” Mari remembers. “Roe V Wade [seminal abortion rights case] had just been passed a few years before. I remember writing an essay saying that as far as I was concerned it was the woman’s right to choose. That got me in a lot of trouble in school, I was sent to the principal. That sort of tells you the atmosphere we lived in.” Her father would later tell her that he feared her mother would have a nervous breakdown if Mari kept the baby.

She was shipped off to a mother-and-baby home in “the wilds of Pennsylvania”. She spent five months there until she had her daughter. At the home she was enlisted to counsel other young girls to give up their babies. “Their attitude was ‘you’re adopted and you’re fine, you can tell them how wonderful it is.’”

Mari would later learn that her birth mother had spent close to two years in the Irish mother-and-baby home with her. She had even been breastfed by her mother. Now Mari herself was to be allowed just two days with her own daughter. And yet even in that short time a bond was formed that would never be broken. “Even if I had never seen her we would have bonded,” Mari says now. “All I remember is looking at her beautiful face and saying. ‘I will find you again’. I made this promise to her. And I knew whatever it took, I would keep it.”

She returned home and finished up her final school exams. In her college years all of the emotion of the adoption came bubbling to the surface. “Whatever normal experimentation a young person would do — I did all that to the power of 10. Drugs, dating around, you name it. Anything that I could do to try to forget what happened, and you know, you can’t. Looking back on it all my mother said it was pretty clear we all needed some fairly intensive counselling. We never got it.”

Unbeknown to Mari her daughter had been adopted by a local couple. Years later Mari would find out that she had gone on to attend the same high school that Mari had been attending when she became pregnant.

After college Mari found a job in a bank, specialising in the then-new ATM technology. She applied for a job in Orlando, Florida, and moved there for a few years. She met her future husband and they had two children but their relationship ran into trouble. “He was a serious mess,” she remembers. “Now I’m old enough to understand that that was actually part of the attraction. My own self-esteem issues led me to him. He was physically and verbally abusive. I had him arrested. One night he broke into my house. He held me at gunpoint for six hours while he debated if he would just shoot me or shoot himself. I was absolutely terrified, I was praying the kids would stay in the bedroom; I didn’t want them to see. They stayed out of the way mostly, thank God, but my son did ask him [his father] if he “was going to shoot mommy”.

Eventually Mari’s husband shot himself but the bullet exited him and hit her in the side of her face. She remembers the surge of panic. It felt “like someone had punched me in the head”. Pouring with blood, she somehow grabbed the kids and “got the hell out”. Later her neighbours would tell her that they could track her movement down the pavement by the blood trail that had leaked out of her body onto the pavement. There were two ambulances that night, one containing Mari, the other holding her husband. “They were trying to reassure me, saying he is breathing. I was thinking, ‘I hope he isn’t.’” As far as Mari knows he died on the way to the hospital.

The incident prompted some serious soul searching for Mari. “I thought. ‘I have survived some pretty nightmarish things.’ I wanted to know who had given me that strength. I needed to know where I had really come from.” This was 1993 and the internet as a search tool for the public was still in its infancy but Mari was able to get in touch with genealogy researchers and other adopted people who had found their birth parents. “Finally I got in touch with this one fellow who said he knew this guy who is a heritage researcher in Dublin. Because of the way I was adopted my parents had held onto our first names so I thought he would have a little to go on. I emailed this guy in Dublin and he was able to find my birth certificate. Seeing my mother’s name for the first time was incredible.”

Mari was put in touch with another woman in Cleveland, Ohio, who had herself been adopted from an Irish mother-baby home. “She told me you have to write to the Sacred Heart in Cork and see if they will give you non-identifying information, such as the county of [the mother's] birth. We found out she had been around 24 when she had me. They said there was something in her file that indicated she was ‘orphaned’. We had noticed that on my birth cert there was a diagonal line where my father’s name should have been. I always referred to my father as Mr Diagonal Line.”

Using just her name and given age Mari found a number of birth certificates that might belong to her mother. “One stuck out because it also had the diagonal line on the cert, meaning she had been born out of wedlock like I was,” Mari remembers. She knew that many women from that period, particularly those who had children out of wedlock, didn’t stay in Ireland. And so she decided she would expand her search to the UK. “I had a friend of mine look through marriage records in London. We found someone who we thought might be her. The year of birth was wrong but the name, month and day matched what we already had.

“The address was on the marriage cert was in Swindon and as luck would have it the fellow who owned the place they were living in at the time still owned it. My friend rang him and presented the case, gently explaining that we didn’t want to upset anyone. He was very good and it turned out he still knew them. He said, ‘don’t you worry, I know how to ask questions without seeming like I’m asking questions’. Apparently as soon as he mentioned it to her husband the husband immediately said ‘that must have been the baby she gave up in Ireland’. She had confided in him and told him the whole story.

“Within a couple of days I was on the phone with my mother,” Mari recalls. “And it was bizarre. It was as though we had just spoken the week before and were picking up on a conversation we had been having. I was more concerned for her, telling her I didn’t blame her and so on. I told her I had been through the same thing and she was kind of stunned. She told me, ‘I just hope they treated you better than they did me.’”

A few months later Mari flew to the UK to meet her birth mother and her husband. They got on famously. “We are like twins. It was very emotional and incredible. Her hair looked great. I was secretly delighted for the hair genes.”

Mari’s mother had had one other child who had died at birth. “Her health has not been good. She cherishes every phone call with me, as do I. She told me she had gone back to Sacred Heart in 1963 with her husband-to-be. And she thought she could get me back, but they wouldn’t give her any information. Like a lot of women she didn’t fully understand that it was a formal, binding relationship.” Mari also learned that her birth-father had died but she was able to get in touch with several half-siblings from his side, in England.

The success of the sleuthing and meeting with her mother made Mari wonder even more about her own daughter. “I knew I had to wait until she was 18. So I put her on the backburner until 1996.” By that point the girl’s adoptive family had already been in touch with the adoption agency. “They were very open-minded and accepting of her searching. I had written her a personal letter to be put in her adoption file and they gave that to her,” says Mari.

The Catholic charity, which had been in charge of the placement, insisted that they act as the middleman, ferrying letters back and forth between Mari and her daughter, Kerry. Mari and Kerry soon lost patience with this and bypassed the charity by finding each other on the internet. At first Mari was too nervous to make the phone call and let her partner call instead. Eventually she plucked up the courage to speak to her now-adult daughter. “The first time I spoke to her on the phone she was like ‘hey mom’; it was as though we had known each other forever,” Mari remembers. Kerry travelled to Florida to visit Mari and they spent many nights talking into the small hours. “When I hugged her I told her, ‘you smell the same’. There are things imprinted on the brain that you never forget.” Kerry has just remarried. She introduces Mari as her “mom”.

“I was very lucky about how everything went,” Mari now says. “I caution people who are making their own searches that they have to have the attitude of expecting nothing. You might find some poor woman who was stigmatised by the nuns and told to forget everything. It can be quite a shock to people.”

Both Mari’s biological mother and daughter are behind her all the way in her case against authorities in Ireland. One of the Sacred Heart nuns in Cork has written to Mari saying, “our legal advisors have carried out extensive research in this area. They have satisfied themselves that the Sacred Heart Sisters had nothing to do with the arrangement of these trials. Two statements have been taken from staff who were in the home at the time. In no way was there any financial gain to the home.”

The letter would seem to imply there were trials, even though it insists the nuns who were in charge of the home had nothing to do with them.

Mari, who is now director of technology and new media at the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia, says that if she is successful it will open the door for further actions against the Department of Health, the Sacred Heart Order and GlaxoSmithKline, relating to trials in mother-and-baby homes. She speaks of people she knows personally who have been left with “festering marks” on their body.

Mari says she feels no bitterness about her past. She has forgiven her adoptive parents for making her give up her daughter. “My father apologised to me many years later,” she says. “He became more of a real person in my mind after that.” She is remarkably philosophical about her drama-filled life — shootings, adoptions, alleged medical experiments. “It has been incredible and from a healthy perspective there is a good amount of sadness,” she says. “Adopted people are the only people in the world who have two different fates laid out in front of them. In my case would I have been shot in the face and have had to surrender my own daughter to adoption? Maybe not. I could drive myself nuts thinking about that. I try to believe that that which doesn’t kill us only makes us stronger.”

- Donal Lynch

Sunday Independent