A MUM told how she believes taking two little pills prescribed to her during her pregnancy has devastated her son’s life.

Women can now get the result of a pregnancy test within days of conceiving a child - but back in the Sixties and Seventies they would have to wait three months.

In 1967, at the age of 25, Sheila Harvey was living in Forest Gate, London, and suspected she was pregnant. About to move to Suffolk, she was eager to know whether she was expecting.

A visit to her GP resulted in a prescription for Primodos, a powerful hormone. After taking it, if a woman wasn’t pregnant she would menstruate.

Mrs Harvey was indeed six weeks pregnant. Like hundreds of other women prescribed the drug, she went on to have a baby beset by health problems and deformities.

Only now has the Government agreed to investigate the drug prescribed shortly after the Thalidomide scandal shocked the world.

Mrs Harvey, now 70, of Green Lane, Eastwood, has fought for justice for her son Raymond for 40years. She said: “In those days they used to inject a woman’s urine into toads and you had to wait three months to find out if you were expecting. As I was moving I was keen to find out if I was pregnant. The doctor gave me two tablets. One I was to take at 10pm and the other at 10am the following day. If I didn’t have a period I would know I was pregnant - and I was.

“We moved and I had a trouble-free pregnancy, but from the day my son was born I knew that something wasn’t right.

“I was breastfeeding him but he hadn’t the breath to take it. I started feeding him by bottle but he could only taken an ounce every hour. I was feeding him day and night every hour.”

Mrs Harvey added: “When he was ten-weeks-old I took him for his polio vaccine and he screamed all night and had diarrhoea so I took him to the doctor. I’ll never forget. He laid him on his lap and said ‘doesn’t he worry you?’ He’d worried me from the day he was born.

“The doctor sent him to Bury St Edmund’s Hospital and I was relieved someone was taking notice.”

It was discovered Raymond had a single ventricle in his heart, no heart chamber and the arteries in his heart were the wrong way round.

At just three-months-old, he had the first of several procedures at London’s Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital. It was to relieve pressure that was building on his lungs.

His condition meant all milestones, including walking, were delayed. He eventually attended a school for children with disabilities.

At the age of 14, major surgery corrected his heart condition - but his childhood was one of pain and illness.

How aged 49, Raymond is reclusive. In his mother’s words he “has no life.”

She and hundreds of other families are continuing to fight for recognition and compensation for their children.

Mrs Harvey said: “I had no idea what this drug had done until I read it in the Sun in 1976. I felt awful but at the same time relieved they had found a cause. They never found a genetic cause for what Raymond had.

“I fought this ever since. There used to be about 800 of us but now our numbers have dwindled as parents and children have died.

“Strangely, my medical records from that time disappeared, but I have a copy of the prescription I was given. One of the other campaigners got hold of it for me. There is a lot of evidence the drug company was in the wrong. We just want justice.”