Four decades after leaving Bessborough’s mother and baby in Cork, Ireland, Mari Steed made a terrible discovery. While there, as a child, she had participated in what she calls a “highly unethical” vaccine test.
Starting at 5 months of age, Steed was vaccinated at least three times with an experimental injection to prevent diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus and polio, her medical record revealed, which she shared with NBC News. Steed, now 60, later learned that the vaccine was administered without the knowledge of her birth mother, with whom she lived during the first 18 months of her life in Bessborough.
At least dozens of other children in the homes of mothers and babies – institutions already closed and run by churches in Ireland for single women and their children – would have participated in these trials during the same period. Like Steed, others who met with their birth mothers found that there was also no parental consent for their participation.
“Scientifically, I understand that there is no research group more perfect than a group of captive children. But that requires huge ethical protocols, and it just wasn’t followed, ”said Steed, who was adopted in Bessborough by an American family. “Whether out of sheer ignorance or ‘We don’t care what happens to these kids’ – that part still makes me angry.”
On Tuesday, the Investigation Commission of the House of Mother and Baby in Ireland and certain related matters in Ireland will release a long-awaited report on various abuses in the homes. The report should contain details of the vaccine tests that will be shared for the first time with survivors, their families and the public.
The houses were the subject of an investigation for years after the 2014 discovery of an unidentified mass grave in another house of Irish mothers and babies in Tuam, County Galway, where almost 800 children died from 1925 to 1961.
Six interim commission reports were released. In these, the commission concluded that many of the children died of malnutrition and other preventable diseases; sometimes their bodies were sent to universities for anatomical studies.
The final report, particularly any details on experimentation with the vaccine, is “long overdue,” said Steed, who now lives in Ruther Glen, Virginia, and works at a day spa after a career in banking and academia. She made it her life’s work to illuminate the inhumane practices suffered by single Irish women and their children.
Steed hopes that everyone who is still alive involved in testing the vaccine, including researchers, pharmaceutical workers or the nuns who ran Bessborough, will be held responsible.
Their general offense, she said, was to treat household residents as “less than the rest of society” – which left many survivors, like her, with lasting emotional scars.
“In Ireland at that time, it was just considered acceptable,” said Steed. “If you were a single woman or your child was the product of a non-marital relationship, you were ‘another’, because that is what the church taught people to do.”
The vaccine he received was produced by Burroughs Wellcome, a pharmaceutical company that later merged with GlaxoSmithKline. Steed confirmed through a request for freedom of information with GlaxoSmithKline in 2011 that she had been shot; she shared the confirmation she received with NBC News.
A nation faces its shameful past
Steed found out he was on trial when he started searching his medical records in the 1990s.
Records show that she received her last injection shortly before she was sent to her foster family in Philadelphia in late 1961. The family had no idea that she had participated in the vaccine test, she said.
GlaxoSmithKline declined to comment on individual records and declined to comment on the investigation before the report was released, but told NBC News in a statement that it “fully cooperated with the Commission and provided copies of relevant documents from its historical archives”.
The Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, the Roman Catholic order that directed Bessborough’s mother and baby, said they also cooperated with the commission in passing on information. They declined to comment on the individual allegations.
As for the vaccine test, the Sisters said in an email to NBC News that “they had no information to support the statement made in their consultation”.
Steed does not believe that she suffered any physical effects from the ordeal she endured. In 2014, a doctor who supervised tests at the homes of mothers and babies said that the vaccines did not harm the children involved; NBC News was unable to verify this statement.
Accusations about houses run by nuns have caused profound shame in a country steeped in Catholicism. Although the commission does not have the power to grant financial compensation to victims or their families, many expect the Irish government to act.
“The government’s first step should be to provide individuals with full access to their own information,” said Maeve O’Rourke, professor of human rights at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and co-director of Project Clann, a pro bono initiative that has gathered evidence to the commission and defended on behalf of mothers and their children.
“People have a right to the truth – the right to know who they are, what happened to them, what happened to their missing relatives. This is the absolute basic requirement that the government must meet before any other form of redress can have meaning or sincerity, ”she said.
The commission focused on the story of 14 homes for mothers and babies and four county houses in Ireland from 1922 to 1998. All closed before the investigation began.
Steed said she feels like a “guinea pig” and is furious that her birth mother, Josephine Bassett, was never informed about the trial.
Bassett gave birth at age 26. When Steed met with Bassett in 2002, Bassett said she felt forced to choose adoption – but she begged the nuns to send their baby girl to an American family so that there was less chance of Steed ending up on the fringes of Irish society like her. Steed and Bassett had a close relationship until Bassett’s death in 2013.
It is not clear whether any of the commission’s interim reports resulted in accusations. Steed hopes that Tuesday’s final report will.
“If there are living people who can be held responsible for crimes, I hope that they will be properly prosecuted, punished and that they will not be able to get away with being nuns, priests or members of the government,” she said.