Florida Republican Representative Kat Cammack was widely criticized after opening up to reporter Tara Palmeri about having trouble accessing abortion for an ectopic pregnancy in Florida after she helped pass a six-week abortion ban in the state.
Cammack told the Wall Street Journal that she faced delays in receiving treatment for a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy shortly after Florida’s six-week abortion ban took effect in May 2025.
Cammack blamed those delays not on the law itself but on what she described as misleading messaging from abortion-rights advocates that had made healthcare workers fearful of legal repercussions, telling the Journal:
“It was absolute fearmongering at its worst. There will be some comments like, ‘Well, thank God we have abortion services,’ even though what I went through wasn’t an abortion.'"
Yeah, I got some bad news about that.
https://www.kff.org/womens-health-policy/a-review-of-exceptions-in-state-abortions-bans-implications-for-the-provision-of-abortion-services/
Basically 6 states (Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Alabama, Idaho, South Dakota, and Wisconsin) have no provision to protect the health of the pregnant person. They only have provisions to protect the life of the mother. The issue is it’s so poorly written in many states they have to wait until the mother is actively dying to act.
Ectopic pregnancies are deadly, eventually. They can stay in place for weeks without actually killing the woman. It’s well documented that in many states women have been told to wait in the parking lot until the condition became severe enough that it was life threatening.
I’m well aware. It’s so brutal that saying it’s barbaric is unfair to barbarians. Fortunately for her, Florida wasn’t on that list. In the terrible past, a woman could say “I’ll kill myself if I have to continue this pregnancy,” which would allow the doctor to act to save her life. In the more-terrible present, the draconian laws are written to prevent any such acts of humanity. The thumb is pushing so hard on the scale towards the “baby” rather than the woman (who has no value except as a mother) that the laws are indeed poorly written, on purpose.
She did a lot of work on this bill, and likely had a role in planning the exceptions. These poorly written exceptions that is.
The part that really highlighted it for me is she got to experience exactly what those actually mean practically. Of course instead of realizing this was her fault she blamed doctors for not understanding her poorly written law. Republicans can take no responsibility for their actions, its always someone else’s fault