Veil of Secrecy Lifts on Irish Children Brought to America

Every day, Larry Petre watched the car drive past his office window with a striking, redheaded boy strapped in the seat next to his mother.

Every day, Petre walked to his window to admire the boy, wondering who he was and where he got his carrot-colored locks.

When they met, Petre had the surprise of his life. The boy was a nephew Petre never knew he had, the son of a sister nobody ever told him about.

Petre’s happy ending had a sad beginning, like at least 2,200 other American citizens who were born out of wedlock in Ireland between 1949 and 1973, then shipped off to the United States for adoption so they would not have to live as outcasts in their homeland.

Now, decades later, many of them are trying to track their birth parents and siblings. One church organization, the Sacred Heart Adoption Society, receives as many as 200 requests a year for birth information. And one counseling service received about 1,500 inquiries in one recent year.

The Ireland of the time was rigidly Catholic, forbidding premarital sex and artificial birth control. As many as 2,000 children were born out of wedlock each year, most of them in secret at Catholic charity homes where their mothers were sent in shame before their pregnancies became noticeable.

There, the young women gave birth and faced pressure to put their infants up for adoption so they could return home with their reputations intact and marry properly.

Unfortunately, there weren’t enough homes in Ireland for all of them, so the Catholic church looked to the United States. Here, demand outstripped supply and many families were willing to make large donations in exchange for a child, said Mike Milotte, author of “Banished Babies: The Secret History of Ireland’s Baby Export Business.”

Life in “the mother and baby homes,” as they were called in Ireland, could be miserable. The women cleaned and scrubbed for their keep. The nuns showed little sympathy, and the mothers weren’t allowed to spend much time with their newborns. Some tried to run away, but guards invariably caught them.

In some cases, the women stayed as long as two years, breast-feeding and bonding, until their children were taken from them with hardly a goodbye.

At first, there was little outcry about sending the children to the United States, although some went to abusive or unstable homes. For years, concerns that “rejectees” of the U.S. adoption system were turning to Ireland for children went unheeded.

Eventually, Milotte said, there were protests, prompting the church to conduct at least cursory background checks.

What’s more, mothers weren’t always informed that they were signing away their children for life. Some thought that their babies were simply going into foster care until they married and could rear them respectably.

So great was the sense of shame about the process that the nuns often told adoptive families that the children were orphans.

As a result, there is little or no documentation of many adoptions, and locating birth parents or offspring isn’t easy.

Adoption-rights campaigners are pressing the government to set up a national registry, but questions of how much information can be withheld to protect the privacy of both parents and children remain tied up in legal challenges.

Neither the Irish government nor the Catholic church has formally apologized for what happened, although some officials have expressed regret.

“The question of an apology is a difficult one because, in many cases, the children were better off in the United States because Ireland was very poor at the time,” said John Lawton, head of consular services for the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs.

“It’s not all black and white,” he added. “Rightly or wrongly, the people who were involved in this at the time felt they were doing right by the children.”

Petre agrees. He grew up in a loving family in Texas, with no regrets about the way his life turned out. Still, he feels sad about what his mother went through: She had nine children and gave up every single one.

Petre found out the truth about his birth after his adoptive mother went to Ireland in 1981 to find his natural mother for him. They eventually met, but there was no mention of siblings.

Then, three years later, he answered the telephone and heard a woman with a soft brogue introduce herself as Breeda Whitmore.

“I’m your sister,” she said.

After talking, they realized that they lived just 12 miles apart in New Hampshire.

“My God, you could have picked me up off the floor,” Petre now remembers.

Their friendship was instant, and Petre is now godfather to Whitmore’s second child, a daughter. Together, they found all but one of their siblings, and several of them have now met.

“We didn’t have to learn to be brother and sister even though we’d never met,” Petre said. “The minute we saw each other, we bonded. We clicked.”