Guess Who Florida GOP Rep. Kat Cammack Blames For Doctors Not Wanting To Treat Her Ectopic Pregnancy?
It's not her own damn self, we'll tell you that much.
A little over a year ago, Republican Florida Republican Rep. Kat Cammack could have died.
Five weeks into an ectopic pregnancy, she was rushed to the emergency room where doctors told her that they could not treat her, for fear of losing their licenses or ending up in prison if they violated Florida’s then-new abortion ban. Under normal circumstances they would have given her a dose of Methotrexate to expel the pregnancy and save her life immediately, but they were wary to do so, and for good reason.
Cammack, the co-chair of the Pro-Life Caucus, was able to use her connections and status to convince the hospital to treat her, but now claims that the only reason they didn’t do it right away was due to “fearmongering” from abortion rights advocates (like all of us!) scaring them into believing that the law banned treating ectopic pregnancies.
Via the Wall Street Journal:
Cammack doesn’t fault the Florida law for her experience. Instead, she accuses the left of scaring medical professionals with messaging that stressed that they could face criminal charges for violating the law. She said she feels those efforts gave medical staff reason to fear giving drugs even under legal circumstances.
“It was absolute fearmongering at its worst,” she said. She also knows that abortion-rights advocates might see the opposite—that the Republican-led restriction caused the confusion. “There will be some comments like, ‘Well, thank God we have abortion services,’ even though what I went through wasn’t an abortion,” she said. Cammack declined to name the hospital where she received care.
Molly Duane, a senior attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights, told the Wall Street Journal that actually, the law does not specifically bar treating ectopic pregnancies, but it also doesn’t explicitly define them either, and doctors can’t always be 100 percent sure where an embryo has implanted. Dr. Alison Haddock, president of the American College of Emergency Physicians, also told the paper that early pregnancy care and ectopic pregnancies are a “medically complicated space,” and that doctors don’t know “whether their clinical judgment will stand should there be any prosecution.”
Indeed, one very big issue with all of these laws is that forced birthers don’t actually understand how not cut-and-dried these situations are. They think it’s always going to be super clear whether or not a pregnancy is ectopic or if someone is going to die due to complications, and things just don’t work that way.
I also suspect that Kat Cammack and others like her simply do not understand that no one fucking trusts their asses or thinks they have good intentions when it comes to this shit. Either that or they do know that and they are mad about it. That would be a lot easier to do if Cammack had not literally done a campaign video praising her own mother for ignoring the advice of doctors who said that, due to a previous stroke, she might die if she gave birth again, and should therefore have an abortion.
Cammack literally ran on “my mom risked her life, voluntarily, to give birth to me, and I want other women to make that same decision whether it’s voluntary or not.” Why would anyone trust Kat Cammack or anybody like her to make an exception for anyone but herself when it comes to something like an ectopic pregnancy?
You may recall that just a few years ago, forced birthers regularly argued that “reimplantation” of ectopic pregnancies was possible (it is not possible). In 2019, prior to Dobbs, Republicans in Ohio tried to pass a bill requiring doctors to at least attempt reimplantation.
Said bill also would have also imposed the death penalty on anyone who performed an abortion during the commission of a robbery. Really.
In 2022, Missouri Republicans pushed a bill that would not only make abortion illegal, but add extra penalties for having an abortion in the case of an ectopic pregnancy.
Earlier this month, the Trump administration announced that states like Idaho, where abortion is banned without a “life of the mother exception,” would be free to just let women die instead of allowing doctors to give them an abortion in an emergency situation.
So why the hell would anyone in their right mind trust Kat Cammack, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, or any other Republican, to not throw a doctor in prison for giving Methotrexate to someone with an ectopic pregnancy who didn’t have the governor on speed dial?
The idea that doctors are out here being scared off by any “fearmongering” anyone like me is doing is patently absurd. I can barely get doctors to listen to me when I’m sitting in their offices.
Hospitals have actual legal teams who are in charge of advising doctors on whether or not to perform a procedure, the legal risks involved, and determining their best (least likely to get them sued or sent to prison) options for treatment. They’re not just taking my word or the word of any other abortion rights advocates on it. They’re not reading Wonkette and then making these decisions for themselves because they don’t understand the law or because they want to make Republicans look bad (they do a fine enough job of that on their own).
Rather, the opposite is true. We’re listening to doctors and hospital lawyers, who are the ones saying that these laws are dangerous. Perhaps Kat Cammack might like to try that out sometime?
She blames Democrats because of course she does. They refuse to take accountability for a GD thing.
This is pretty personal, but fuck it, they’ve already made the personal political.
People don’t say enough that women capable of childbirth aren’t Planned Parenthood’s only clients.
After college I had a scare and needed to see a doctor, but didn’t have health insurance.
Guess who I went straight to?