Kat Cammack doesn’t blame the Republicans who passed the six-week abortion limit for throwing her miscarriage treatment into legal limbo — she blames the left for talking about it too much.
|
Listen To This Story
 |
Rep. Kat Cammack (R-FL), co-chair of the House Pro-Life Caucus, found her own pregnancy care ensnared by Florida’s new abortion ban last year when emergency room doctors, fearing jail time, hesitated to give her the drug she needed to treat her life-threatening ectopic pregnancy. But she doesn’t blame the Republicans who passed the six-week limit that threw her miscarriage treatment into legal limbo — she blames the left for talking about it too much.
“It was absolute fearmongering at its worst,” she said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal published on Sunday, failing to reckon at all with the actual consequences of these draconian abortion bans.
Florida’s six-week ban had just gone into effect that May in 2024 when Cammack said she woke up bleeding heavily. The law, which prohibits abortions before many women would even realize they’re pregnant, technically carves out exceptions for protecting the life and health of the mother, but the phrasing is so unclear that doctors and hospitals have been afraid of being sued for doing anything that could be construed as an abortion, including miscarriage care. Cammack needed the drug methotrexate, which can be used for medication abortions, to clear her ectopic pregnancy, and she was estimated to be at least five weeks along, so the staff worried that they could lose their licenses or go to jail for treating her.
Cammack’s experience echoes what countless women and medical professionals have been sounding the alarm about in the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022, which sparked a crackdown on legal abortion across red states. A Louisiana woman whose fetus was missing the top of its skull, which would kill the baby within minutes or hours of birth, had to travel many states away for an abortion because Louisiana’s law doesn’t explicitly make an exception for that condition, called acrania. A pregnant Texas woman was forced to bring her own foul discharge into the hospital to prove an infection was killing her in order to qualify for the state’s “life of the mother” exception. A 14-year-old girl in Arizona was suddenly denied methotrexate–the same drug Cammack needed, which the teen had been taking for her debilitating arthritis and osteoporosis–in 2022 because it can induce abortion in girls of childbearing age. Arizona’s ban, which took effect that year, threatens two to five years in prison for providing abortion.
At least two other women have died in Texas, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune co-reported, because their miscarriage care fell into “a gray area” under the state’s strict abortion laws, and doctors were too afraid to treat them until it was too late. Two more have died in Georgia.
Some states have been moved to loosen their abortion laws or at least clarify the exceptions in those laws after news coverage of harrowing tragedies like these. Florida issued guidance months after Cammack had her health scare explaining that doctors can treat ectopic pregnancies; a Georgia judge lifted the state’s six-week ban.
But it’s not “fearmongering” by the left that’s created this situation; it’s the laws themselves. And the legal threats to medical staff aren’t hypothetical — abortion providers and women who self-administer medication abortions are literally being sued and criminally charged. Texas went so far as to sue a doctor in New York for prescribing abortion pills by mail to a woman in Texas, taking the fight across state lines.
It was only a matter of time before a Republican member of Congress had a personal run-in with one of these new laws that her caucus had enabled. In this case, Cammack was so frustrated by the denial of emergency health care that she called the governor’s office to pull some strings for her, to no avail. One might assume that such a moment would cause a woman to re-think being the co-chair of the House Pro-Life Caucus, which champions laws that force these kinds of situations, and worse, on women across the country every day.
But the medical staff eventually gave in and provided Cammack the necessary drug, and she went on to become pregnant again. Considering the maternal mortality rates in Florida, it almost certainly helped that she is a congresswoman and white. Black and Latina women are not having the same kind of luck convincing doctors in the South to take a risk on them, which is why women like Amber Thurman are in the grave.
Cammack’s Wall Street Journal interview concludes by noting that she voted against a bill, proposed by two women colleagues, that would’ve allowed new parents in Congress to vote remotely for a few weeks after birth. It seems her support for becoming a mother only goes so far.
