They could prove nothing. There was no evidence that Helen O’Reilly was ever there. And how would they believe that a woman of Mamie’s years could drag the body of a pregnant woman out of her first-floor flat, down the stairs and up the street?
On Christmas Eve 1956, Mamie Cadden was sentenced to hang for the death of a woman on whom she had performed an abortion that had gone wrong. Mamie had been performing these operations in Dublin since the 1920s, but in the increasingly isolated and conservative Ireland of the 1940s the lid was lifted on Dublin’s abortion services. ‘Nurse Cadden’ had trained as a midwife at the National Maternity Hospital and soon opened her own nursing home. She was a regular sight in Dublin driving around town in her red open-top MG sportscar, blonde hair blowing in the breeze. From 1940 she concentrated her business on providing a busy abortion service in Ireland. In the face of escalating government, police and church hostility to services for women, Mamie was unrepentant about her work. This is the story of Ireland’s most famous abortionist and the times in which she lived.