The memory lane of back street abortions

Diarmaid Ferriter reviews a new book that looks at the issue of back street abortions in 20th century Ireland and writes of the silence and stigma that still persists

Screening of the much praised Mike Leigh film, Vera Drake, which centres on a woman working secretly as a back street abortionist in London in 1950, coincided with the publication of Ray Kavanagh's new book, Mamie Cadden, Back street Abortionist (Mercier Press). It promised to uncover the life and times of Ireland's most famous abortionist.

Kavanagh put in a robust performance on the Marian Finucane Show on RTÉ, when interviewed about the book. He clearly viewed Mamie Cadden as a liberated feminist, an enemy of hypocrisy, and one who fought against a conspiracy to deny the fact that there were many Irish women who wanted to have an abortion.

Ultimately, he presents her as a martyr who was consumed by a suffocating alliance of Church and State and who ended her days in Dundrum Mental Hospital as a convicted murderer, when she was nothing of the sort.

He further emphasised how professionally competent she was, having trained as a midwife; how sexy she was with her blonde hair and fashionable clothes, and most importantly, her open top MG sports car, such an unusual sight in Dublin of the 1930s. Kavanagh, it became clear, was infatuated with Mamie.

There are many criticisms that can be made of this book and Kavanagh's infatuation. It is, to be fair, a fascinating page-turner, but it is also full of exaggeration, gossipy, rambling and ignores all sorts of questions that do not fit his thesis.

"Ireland", he asserts, "had returned to the savagery of a witch trial of the middle ages". Cadden was in fact an incompetent abortionist whose botched operations led to the death of at least two pregnant women and caused physical pain for many others.

When running her own nursing home in the 1930s in Rathmines she was also involved in "child abandonment", which involved racing out to Dunsaughlin in the sports car and dumping the baby by the roadside. Dumping bodies, dead and alive, was in fact one of her specialities.

The most notorious case related to Helen O'Reilly, whose body was found on Hume St on 18 April 1956. Mamie Cadden was no Vera Drake. She was not happy with being a back street operator at all. She seems to have enjoyed her notoriety, the press coverage, and in the absence of the sophisticated forensic tests that came years later, the difficulties of connecting her to the dumped bodies of badly operated on women.

Cadden was no feminist icon, and had no empathy with the women who had unwanted pregnancies. This enabled her to treat the dead women with such callousness. She had already served prison terms for child abandonment and abortion in 1939 and 1945.

Brigid Breslin, a 33-year-old dancer in the Olympia Theatre, was also killed after a botched Cadden operation and died on her kitchen table in 1951. As there was no evidence to link Cadden with the body, she got away with that one.

Kavanagh does deserve credit for telling Cadden's story. In a simplistic and lazy way, the words "Nurse Cadden" became synonymous with evil. There were all sorts of rumours about the extent of her supposed monstrosity, without an acknowledgement of what enabled her to stay in business.

That is what it was, a business, and Cadden did not make any bones about why she did it – to make money so that she could live with a degree of ostentation unavailable to most midwives.

Cadden was not a murderer, and in the modern era, the charge of murder against her would not have withstood legal challenge. The botched operations which involved the pumping of a mixture of water and disinfectant into wombs created air embolisms which killed her patients. These were accidental.

The basis for the murder charge was under section 58 of the 1861 Offences Against the Persons Act: a person who "unlawfully" procured the miscarriage of a woman was considered to have committed a felony. A patient dying as a result of such a procedure was not considered to have died during a medical operation, so a murder charge could be brought against the person who carried out the operation.

This in itself was ambiguous. The act referred to those "unlawfully" using instruments or administering drugs to procure abortion, but did this imply that there were circumstances in which abortion might be lawful?

As the historian Sandra McAvoy has pointed out, it was not clear what the implication of this legislation was for the medical profession. No charges were ever brought against doctors or midwives for performing abortions for medical reasons, so the application of the legislation in such cases was never tested by the Irish courts. Perhaps it was for this reason that the pro-life lobby was intent on the insertion of a constitutional amendment in 1983.

Kavanagh makes good use of the court records to reconstruct the trials of a number of other people convicted for offering and performing abortions, and he highlights that infanticide was a common occurrence, and seems to have increased in tandem with the clampdown on abortion. But the ambiguity associated with the 1956 Cadden case deserves further scrutiny. Former High Court Judge, Kenneth Deale, who wrote an account of the trial in 1971, questioned whether the trial would have succeeded if Cadden "had been a respectable midwife of good reputation". This points to the importance of the suppression of public discourse about abortion, as opposed to the notoriety of Cadden, which is what has obsessed Ray Kavanagh.

It is that lack of public discourse and ambiguity about the women having abortions that has remained to this day. Helen O'Reilly was not a "young girl"; she was a 33-year-old-mother of six whose husband had deserted her and who was forced to put her children in care in various convents. She had already tried and failed to induce a miscarriage through the use of abortifacient drugs. In a country with no contraception, her plight must have been replicated all over the country.

The late Mary Holland took a brave stand in 1983 in revealing that she had had an abortion. And yet, in 1995, she was still criticising the lack of honesty and discourse, and the lack of political bravery that was highlighted by a failure to legislate for the 1992 X case.

She wrote "it would be an enormous relief if some younger woman or women were to start writing about the issue of abortion from personal experience and leave me to the relatively easy task of analysing the peace process. Please".

The current abortion law exemplifies the moral and legal ambiguities mentioned above, and a public discourse is still not apparent. Ray Kavanagh has given his version of Cadden, but it is only one side of the story. The women who had, and continue to have abortions, are still not heard. Perhaps it is time for Kavanagh, and me, and men generally, to stop writing about abortion.