Mamie Cadden

Mary Anne "Mamie" Cadden (b. 27 October, 1891 in Scranton, Pennsylvania, USA, d. 20 April, 1959 in Dublin, Ireland) was an Irish midwife, backstreet abortionist and convicted murderess.

She was born in America to Irish parents from County Mayo, the eldest of seven children, of whom five survived infancy. The family returned to Ireland in 1895 after Mamie's father inherited his father's farm. In 1925, she moved to Dublin to train as a midwife at the National Maternity Hospital, Holles Street. In 1931 she purchased a property in Rathmines and ran it as her own maternity nursing home. This was a common practice among midwives at the time, the profession then being one that operated independently of nursing and medicine.

As well as delivering babies, where necessary with the attendance of a doctor, Mamie Cadden also passed on unwanted babies — at a fee — to an informal fostering service, which placed them with families who received payment for caring for the child. She also provided abortions — both medical (using preparations such as ergot) and surgical (by injecting a solution) — although the procedure is illegal in Ireland, and she was a well-known and colourful figure in the Dublin of the time. "Nurse Cadden's" activities were an open secret, and in the strongly Roman Catholic Irish Free State of the time, where all forms of contraception and abortion were forbidden, many women had reason to use Cadden's and others' services. Her nursing home in Rathmines came to an end in 1939 when she was sentenced to a year's hard labour in Mountjoy Prison for abandoning a new-born baby on the side of the road in County Meath, and had to sell the property to pay her legal fees.

Once out of prison, she set up business again on modest rented premises, no longer delivering babies (as she had been struck off as a midwife), but continuing to provide abortions and miscellaneous medical treatments such as cures for constipation and dandruff. She fell foul of the law again in 1945, when a pregnant girl who needed hospitalisation after a failed abortion claimed that Cadden had inserted the laminaria tents which were found in her cervix. Cadden denied this and was tried under the Offences Against The Person Act 1861, convicted of procuring an abortion and sentenced once again to penal servitude in Mountjoy Prison, this time for five years. At this time, the state and an Garda Siochána (the police) were engaged in a comprehensive crusade to prosecute the country's abortionists.

She served her full term and once again set up her business on her release, this time in Hume Street, near Dublin's fashionable St Stephen's Green. Although she was operating out of a tiny, dingy one-roomed flat, she was able to continue her illegal business, and was still well-known enough in Dublin not to need to advertise. Even the death of one of her patients from an air embolism in the heart in 1951, whose body Cadden left outside on the street, did not put an end to her activities as there was not sufficient evidence to connect her to the death. Five years later, however, she was not so lucky. Again one of her patients, Helen O'Reilly, died of an air embolism during a procedure to abort a fetus in the fifth month. When her body was found on the pavement in Hume Street, Cadden was arrested and tried for murder. She was sentenced to death by hanging in 1956, but this was commuted to life imprisonment after public appeals for clemency and due to the unintentional nature of Helen O'Reilly's death.

Cadden started serving her term in Mountjoy Prison, but was declared insane and moved to the Criminal Lunatic asylum in Dundrum, Dublin, where she died of a heart attack in 1959. She and the case remain well-known in Irish criminal history, and her controversial activities the stuff of Dublin legend. In 1994, she was the subject of one episode of an RTÉ television documentary series entitled Thou Shalt not Kill, which examined and dramatised famous Irish murder cases.