Come Here To Me!

In a very grim way, Mamie Cadden (1891 -1959) found her way into the folklore of Dublin city. Dublin’s most infamous ‘backstreet abortionist’, her name was almost synonymous with evil in the city for a generation, and she emerges in several memoirs of Dublin in the mid-twentieth century. Edna O’Brien remembered hearing of Cadden, “to some an angel of deliverance, to others a murderer, and who would die, declared insane, in a lunatic asylum in Dundrum.”

Mamie Cadden, photographed following one of several arrests.

Yet Mamie Cadden, whose story has inspired books (Ray Kavanagh’s Mamie Cadden: Backstreet Abortionist) and documentaries was just one part of a much bigger tale. In the Dublin of her time, there were many others who emerged as so-called ‘backstreet abortionists’, and across the city men and women like Cadden offered to provide terminations to women who found themselves in crisis pregnancies.

In 1941, The Bell noted that when faced with a crisis pregnancy, “The well-off young woman confesses to her parents; she is hustled off, normally to London, Paris, Biarritz, comes back without the baby, and nobody is any the wiser.” For working class women unable to travel to Britain for terminations, Dublin provided options, but to what extend did the authorities know this was going on, and what motivated people like Cadden and others discussed in this piece?

Exporting Abortion, “An English Solution to an Irish Problem”:

In his groundbreaking history of sex and Irish society, historian Diarmaid Ferriter clearly demonstrated that there is little new about Irish women traveling to the UK for terminations, noting that:

There were no prosecutions in Ireland for illegal abortions between 1938 and 1942…but as a result of the travel restrictions imposed during the war years, there were 25 cases prosecuted in Ireland between 1942 and 1946, while after the war the number of prosecutions decreased, with only 12 cases between 1947 and 1956.

The late 1930s witnessed the beginning of moves towards the liberalisation of British abortion laws (though it was still a long journey towards the 1967 Abortion Act) and it has been argued that “the trek of pregnant women from Ireland to England to have abortions really began in the late 1930s, not the late 1960s as is usually stated“. As British abortion laws changed in subsequent decades, and travel became more affordable, more and more women availed of the option of terminations in Britain. In 1975, June Levine wrote in the Sunday Independent that:

If England closed her doors to Irish clients, Ireland would be beset with a major problem of backstreet abortion. The savage treatment of single mothers in our society is in the main the cause of the abortion trek to England.

William Henry Coleman of Merrion Square:

Were it not for Cadden, perhaps William Henry Coleman would be the most widely known of Dublin’s ‘backstreet abortionists’ historically. Certainly, plenty of column inches went on reporting on trials of Coleman in the 1940s, as his Merrion Square clinic was on the receiving end of much police attention. As Cadden’s biographer has noted, “he was very different to Mamie Cadden especially in that he had no medical qualification whatever….He was an electrician with a criminal record. In 1933 he had been convicted of arson, attempts to procure money under false pretences and a bankruptcy-related charge, and had received three years penal servitude.”

Coleman advertised his services in Dublin newspapers, offering to deal with “psychological, nervous [or] sexual troubles.” There was nothing new about cryptic newspaper advertisements for such services, advertisements like Coleman’s had been appearing in the international press since Victorian times. His services were not cheap; Tim Pat Coogan has recalled hearing of Coleman’s business operation:

I later discovered that he had run a flourishing abortion practice, charging Dublin’s better-off women IR£60 a time, a very large amount of money in those days. Other well-known abortionists of the period charged approximately half that amount, but such fees were still utterly beyond the reach of working class women who lived in a world where labouring men earned two or three pounds a week….

Coleman and others like him benefited from the travel restrictions imposed here during ‘The Emergency’, which made it difficult for women to access terminations in Britain. In April 1944, Coleman was arrested and his premises raided. When he made it to the courts the Prosecution went as far as to say that “no fouler being has ever crossed the threshold of the dock: Your Lordship has never had before you a man so consummate in his infamy, so depraved and vile in his occupation and in so many aspects of his life.” Coleman was sentenced to fifteen years penal servitude, later reduced to seven years.

1945 press report on the conviction of William Henry Coleman.

Before the suppression of Coleman’s premises, an earlier police operation had closed a Parkgate Street abortion clinic, which was said to be the busiest in the city. On that occasion, a woman was sentenced for “nine counts concerning an illegal operation”, receiving ten years penal servitude. It was clear the authorities were cracking down.

Mamie Cadden and the Helen O’Reilly case:

The most high profile case relating to abortion came in November 1956, with the death of Helen O’Reilly.  A few months before this case began, the body of O’Reilly had been found dumped on Hume Street, following a botched operation. O’Reilly’s story was heartbreaking, as she had already traveled to England attempting to procure a termination, but failing this had returned home desperate for assistance. She was a mother of six in financial difficulty, and separated from her husband. He was none other than the maverick John Francis O’Reilly, who had parachuted into Ireland as a spy of Nazi Germany in the 1940s. This dimension of the story added to press interest.

Mamie Cadden, who was convicted of carrying out the procedure, had a long history herself. Born in Pennsylvania but raised in Mayo, she had studied as a midwife at the National Maternity Hospital in the 1930s before opening a privately run maternity hospital in Rathmines. There, she would deliver babies, but also pass on unwanted babies to foster families.

Cadden did well financially from her Rathmines business; her entry in the Dictionary of Irish Biography notes that she “enjoyed a flashy social life, frequenting dances, dining and drinking in Dublin’s top hotels, and driving a highly conspicuous imported red open-top 1932 MG sports car.” She would certainly have stood out from the pack in 1930s Dublin, and her appearance was often commented on. Later, during a court appearance, it was noted that she was “dressed in a fur hat, beaver-type fut coat, multi-coloured scarf and wearing horn-rimmed spectacles.”

In the late 1930s, Cadden was caught up in quite a major scandal, when an infant child was found abandoned on the side of the road in County Meath, and her rather unique sports car was spotted in the vicinity. She served a year in Mountjoy’s women prison, but re-emerged in the aftermath of this case, establishing a new practice on Pembroke Street, and advertising in newspapers as “Nurse Cadden”. In the winter of 1944, she was charged with “attempting to procure a miscarriage”, and sentenced to five-years in the now familiar surroundings of Mountjoy.

Remarkably, she once again re-established herself in the aftermath of this, this time at Hume Street, and it’s been said that in the 1950s she enjoyed “a virtual monopoly on abortion services in Dublin.” The state had used the ‘Offences Against the Person Act’ against others who were providing such services in the past, driving many out of the industry. Such state opposition left Cadden and a small number of others in the capital. Helen O’Reilly was not the first female body to appear on Hume Street, from which Cadden was operating. In 1951, the body of Brigid Breslin was found on the street. A popular young dancer from the Olympia Theatre, her death was not enough to put Cadden out of business, with a lack of evidence preventing any action against her.

The O’Reilly case became front page news.

In court, the misogyny towards Helen O’Reilly was shameful, with the character of the dead woman repeatedly attacked. It was somehow felt worth pointing out that “she was a woman living apart from her husband, living with other men… visiting public-houses and spending long periods there. There is no need to remind you of all that. It is proper you should have that evidence.” Cadden was sentenced to hang, though this was commuted to life imprisonment. Later found insane, she died in Dundrum’s criminal lunatic asylum in April 1959. Her death in an asylum no doubt added to the folklore around this mysterious character.

 There is always a danger of reading history backwards, of trying to find some kind of hero in Cadden that just isn’t there. She herself spoke in a very derogatory manner about the women who came to see her, even referring to them as “whores”, and she didn’t offer these services to women out of some kind of sympathy with their plight, but rather it was a service from which she profited. As Catriona Crowe has argued:

The fact that she was providing a much-needed service to desperate women who were denied access to contraception does not of itself make her a feminist heroine. She was well paid for her work, and insisted on money up front. Vera Drake she was not.

William Henry Coleman, Mamie Cadden and others like them were able to profit from the illegality of proper abortion services in Ireland. Just as it had been before them, abortion would remain a part of life in subsequent decades. In 1963, Trinity News correctly noted that “it is a strange truth that Catholic Dublin has a very high illegitimacy rate, and abortion, though illegal, is by no means uncommon.”

Abortion has always been present in human society, and that will not change. There is a necessity now, as there was in decades past, to provide women with safe abortion services, thus relegating such ‘backstreet abortionists’ to the pages of history.

Further Reading: Ray Kavanagh’s study of Mamie Cadden has been recently republished by Mercier Press. Diarmaid Ferriter’s study was released in 2009 by Profile Books. Lastly, Chrystel Hug’s The Politics of Sexual Morality in Ireland is available from Palgrave Macmillan.