Silent shock: How a drug given to mums in the 60s maimed their babies.

“After handing the baby to the nurses, I talked to Wendy. I told her that I had some very unfortunate news. I then just simply told her that her baby girl had no arms and no legs. Wendy looked at me for a few moments without saying anything, as if she were processing what I had said. Then she said: ‘We’ll just have to look after her very well then”.

Dr Ron Dickinson, had stepped in to deliver baby Lyn in 1962 when Wendy Rowe’s usual doctor could not be found. It was the pre-scan, pre-ultra sound era, and Dr Dickinson had no inkling of what had befallen Lyn.

Fifty years later he was moved to tears while telling me how the baby had emerged first with no arms and then with no legs as a result of thalidomide – a drug prescribed to Wendy and many other women at the time to prevent the effects of morning sickness during pregnancy.

After Lyn was born, the doctors and nurses had urged Wendy and her husband Ian to put their baby in an institution. “She won’t survive for long,” they said. “Forget about her”. “Go home and look after your other girls”. “Try and have another child as soon as possible”.

That didn’t happen. Instead, Wendy and Ian took Lyn home from hospital and took care of her. Full-time, round-the-clock care, often exhausting, sometimes backbreaking, always loving. Lyn needed help with everything, and always would. Eating, drinking, toileting, washing, dressing and every single other mundane detail of daily living. Without limbs she could do almost nothing for herself.

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In 2012, more than 50 years after Lyn’s birth, thalidomide giant Grünenthal finally got around to issuing an apology for the devastation caused by its drug. While the apology was something, the excuse for taking five decades to say sorry insulted and infuriated survivors around the world.

“We ask that you regard our long silence as a sign of the silent shock that your fate has caused us,” Grünenthal’s boss had said.

From a company that had taken 50 years to choose its words, it was an outstandingly poorly judged public relations exercise.

Wendy Rowe, for one, was appalled. Grünenthal’s drug had deprived her daughter of arms and legs and now it was claiming to have been in shock all these years? She could not believe it. And at a press conference she laid bare her feelings about Grünenthal and its chief executive. ‘I suspect he might not know what shock is,’ she told reporters through tears. ‘Shock is having your precious child born without arms and legs. It’s accepting that your child is not going to have the life you wanted for her.’

I stood beside Wendy at that press conference and that moment, as a dignified grandmother highlighted the shameful behaviour of the German drug company.

For two years I had worked as part of a legal team which only months earlier had won the Rowe family a multi-million dollar settlement from Distillers, the UK company which sold the drug in Australia. It was enough to provide Lyn with first class care of the rest of her life, relieving her ageing parents of the 24/7 carer role they had taken on since 1962.

During the litigation I had travelled to the UK, Germany and New Zealand interviewing witnesses, digging up documents, gathering the material necessary to take on two rich and powerful companies.

I had also spent many hours with the Rowe family members, digging, probing, asking hundreds of questions, drafting their witness statements. And throughout, I was struck by their strength and resilience. The family had been dealt an appalling hand and had dealt with it with grace, endurance and humour. In fact Lyn’s exuberance in the face of overwhelming odds was astonishing. “I don’t know why I was asked to speak here because I’m not very good at the parallel bars,” she once began a presentation to a group of gymnastic coaches.

When the litigation ended I started work on a book about the disaster and about the Rowe family. Silent Shock reveals secrets covered up for 50 years. One of the most disturbing is the revelation – by an elderly drug salesman – that senior drug bosses at (the Australian distributor) Distillers in Sydney privately knew the drug may be killing babies yet for another six months kept selling it, including specifically for use in pregnancy. That unfathomable decision cost thousands of lives globally.

Grünenthal – which had invented thalidomide - behaved in a similarly disgraceful fashion, promoting a drug it knew was dangerously flawed as exceptionally safe. In the late 1960s its executives were charged with negligent manslaughter but escaped with a slap on the wrist. Yet Grünenthal was so unfazed that during the 1970s it appointed a man who'd been convicted and jailed for mass murder at Auschwitz during World War Two as the chairman of its board.

And there are, of course, heroes in the story. The US was saved from disaster in 1961 by a brave and wise female doctor at the FDA, Frances Kelsey, who refused to licence the drug for sale. Kelsey resisted ferocious pressure from the US thalidomide licensee and even questioned what possible effect the drug might have on an unborn child. Once the drug was unveiled as a killer, Kelsey was feted at the White House by President Kennedy and the FDA was given new powers to regulate drugs. Kelsey is still alive, though in failing health, having just celebrated her 100th birthday.

When did I decide to write Silent Shock? That day I stood beside 76 year old Wendy Rowe, tears running down her cheeks, standing in front of the television cameras, determined to have her say. Cameras and reporters made her nervous, sick with worry in fact. But she was going to do this. No matter what. She was determined to fight for her daughter and for justice and she did. I‘m proud to have fought for her.

Silent Shock by Michael Magazanik, a journalist turned lawyer, is published by Text. You can purchase it here.

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