Mary Anne "Mamie" Cadden (27 October 1891 – 20 April 1959) was an American-born Irish midwife, backstreet abortionist, and convicted murderer.

In 1895, Cadden and her family returned to Lahardane in County Mayo, Ireland, where she completed years of schooling.

Once she obtained her spot on the list of licensed midwives in Dublin, she opened a series of maternity nursing homes to aid women with health issues and to perform illegal abortions.

She attended Lahardane National School in Mayo until the age of fifteen,[4] and was literate and spoke good Irish and English.

Once many years had passed, Mamie realized she did not want to spend the rest of her life on the farm with her next youngest brother.

[7] This Catholic ethos helped ensure in the Irish health care system made things like contraceptives relatively inaccessible.

[11] At St Maelruin, Cadden gave help for health issues, pregnancies, illegal abortions, and foster care operations for unwanted children born.

[4] In 1939, Cadden was sentenced to a year's hard labour in Mountjoy Prison for abandoning and exposing a new-born baby on the side of the road in County Meath.

[2] After her first conviction for child abandonment, Cadden was removed from the roll of registered midwives and was banned from aiding women in childbirth.

[4] When she was in prison, Cadden was forced to sell St Maelruin as she faced a financial crisis from the legal stresses of her arrest.

Despite denying the charges, she was convicted of procuring an abortion and was sentenced to penal servitude in Mountjoy Prison for five years.

[2] Having served her full term she resumed her former trade on her release, this time in Hume Street, near Dublin's fashionable St Stephen's Green.

Five years later, one of her patients, Helen O'Reilly, died of an air embolism during a procedure to abort a pregnancy in the fifth month.

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 on 20 April 1959.

[2] In 1994, she was the subject of two episodes of RTÉ television documentaries, one in the series entitled Thou Shalt not Kill, which examined and dramatised famous Irish murder cases under the title "The body in Hume Street",[15] and on Monday 18 November 2007, an episode of the RTÉ television documentary series Scannal featured the case under the title "Scannal: Nurse Mamie Cadden".