Mamie Cadden: Backstreet Abortionist

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 c...