New York Irish woman shares her story of being adopted out of a Magdalene Laundry

Etta Thornton-Verma and her twin adopted at six weeks old

Despite being defunct since 1996, the notorious Magdalene Laundries of Ireland have left long lasting legacies. Etta Thornton-Verma shares her story of finding out that her own mother was a victim of one of the workhouses.

A 1,000 page report submitted to the Dail last week about the happenings at Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries tells stories of near slavery for the women that lived there. The Irish government’s use of the Laundries has many calling for an official apology and perhaps even compensation for the some 1,000 survivors.

The laundries were “a mechanism that society, religious orders and the state came up with to try and get rid of people deemed not to be conforming to the so-called mythical, cultural purity that was supposed to be part of Irish identity,” Irish historian Diarmaid Ferriter told RTE this week.

From the laundries came some 2,000 illegal adoptions to the United States. While Etta and her twin sister Samantha were adopted within Ireland to Sligo, their story is similar to many others - that is, the ones who found out the truth about their birth mothers.

Read more: 2,000 Irish children were illegally adopted in US from Magdalene Laundries

Etta Thornton-Verma was just six weeks old when she and her twin were taken from their birth mother in Ireland in 1972. At the time, her mother was living with her newborn twins in a mother and baby home, not in the laundries. The twins’ mother had grown up in state care, and was bounced into the Sean MacDermott Laundry in her mid-teens.

Growing up in Sligo, Etta and her twin Samantha Long had always known that they were adopted, but it wasn’t until they were 23 years old that they found out what kind of life their mother was subjected to after they were adopted.

In 1995 when they were 23, the twins finally got the chance to meet their mother, Margaret Bullen. By that point, Bullen was no longer working in the Sean MacDermott Street Laundry in Dublin, but was living with the nuns there.

“It was very shocking,” says Etta of having met her mother, then 42 years old, for the first time in 1995.

Etta explains that she and her sister had grown up assuming that they were probably conceived as a mistake when their birth mother was just a teenager or in no place to raise children. (They would later find out that their mother became pregnant twice while in the care of the religious order who operated the laundry, and her pregnancies were probably a result of sexual abuse.)

Read more: American survivor of Magdalene Laundries in the United States speaks out

Etta and Samantha were optimistic that their mother had grown up to get married and have children again.

“We hoped for a happy life,” says Etta of what she imagined her mother had gone on to do after she and her twin were adopted.

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Nster.com