Republican’s Life-Threatening Pregnancy Collided With Florida’s Abortion Politics
Due in August with her first child, Rep. Kat Cammack says doctors last year hesitated to treat her ectopic pregnancy
Kat Cammack says the left scared medical professionals last year by stressing that they could face criminal charges for violating the law. ALYSSA SCHUKAR FOR WSJ
By
Katy Stech Ferek
Updated June 22, 2025 2:45 pm ET
Rep. Kat Cammack arrived at the emergency room in May 2024 terrified by what she had just learned: Her pregnancy could kill her at any moment.
It would only get worse. The Florida Republican needed a shot of methotrexate to help expel her ectopic pregnancy, in which there is no way for the embryo to survive. Her state’s six-week abortion ban had just taken effect. She said doctors and nurses who saw her said they were worried about losing their licenses or going to jail if they gave her drugs to end her pregnancy.
She began arguing her case. The staff resisted, she said, even though doctors earlier that day estimated she was just five weeks pregnant. There was no heartbeat, and her life was at risk. She pulled up the state law on her phone for hospital workers to read. She said she called the governor’s office late at night for help, but no one picked up.
Hours later, doctors finally agreed to give her the methotrexate, Cammack said.
The Florida ban, which took effect May 1, 2024, made abortions illegal after six weeks with limited exceptions. It didn’t ban procedures for ectopic pregnancies, but concern about the law’s wording made doctors hesitant, said patients and physicians. Months later, Florida regulators gave guidance to address what they called misinformation, making clear that doctors should intervene in cases such as Cammack’s.
Pregnant again and due this summer, Cammack said the politics of the incident linger with her. While Cammack opposes abortion and co-chairs the House Pro-Life Caucus, she supports exceptions for reported cases of rape and incest in the first trimester and in instances in which the mother’s life is at risk.
Who is to blame?
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.
Abortion-rights advocates say the law created the problems. While Florida regulators say ectopic pregnancies aren’t abortions and are exempt from restrictions, the law doesn’t define ectopic pregnancy, and it isn’t always easy for doctors to tell where an embryo has implanted, said Molly Duane, a senior attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights.
Asked whether abortion-rights groups contributed to confusion, Duane said Florida regulators had stressed how seriously they planned to enforce the ban. She said blaming medical workers echoes the “playbook of antiabortion extremists that for decades have been blaming and villainizing doctors.”
Dr. Alison Haddock, president of the American College of Emergency Physicians, said it is common for doctors in states that have restricted abortion access to worry “whether their clinical judgment will stand should there be any prosecution.”
She called early pregnancy care, including instances of ectopic pregnancies, a “medically complicated space” where uncertainty in diagnoses and treatment plans is common. “This has been a real stress point for a lot of our physicians,” she said.
Cammack, 37, who announced her current pregnancy at a White House event, is on track to become the 14th congresswoman to give birth while in office. Elected to Congress in 2020 after working as a top staff member, she has focused on securing money for Hurricane Helene victims and supporting veterans and farmers in her district in northern Florida.
In a 90-minute interview, she spoke publicly about her miscarriage for the first time. She said she hopes sharing her experience steers conversations toward common ground. “I would stand with any woman—Republican or Democrat—and fight for them to be able to get care in a situation where they are experiencing a miscarriage and an ectopic” pregnancy, she said.
She said the difficult political environment is to blame for preventing discussions on how to improve women’s healthcare.
“We have turned the conversation about women’s healthcare into two camps: pink hats and pink ribbons,” she said. “It’s either breast cancer or abortion.”
In her first year in Congress, she testified about her family’s ties to the issue. Her mother, a stroke survivor, was told by doctors to terminate her pregnancy with Cammack, warning that it put her at risk of another stroke. She went on to deliver Cammack without problems.
‘Am I losing the baby?’
From her office couch on Capitol Hill, Cammack recounted her health scare, pausing several times to clutch her third-trimester belly and count baby kicks.
Last year, she and her husband, Matt Harrison, began trying to have a baby. On May 21, she woke up bleeding heavily. She pulled out a pregnancy test that came with the ovulation kit she ordered off Amazon. It was positive.
“Then it’s this emotional roller coaster of, ‘Oh, my God. Am I pregnant? And am I losing the baby?’ ” she said.
Her doctor confirmed that she might be miscarrying. There was no treatment to offer. So Cammack said she put on “the biggest maxi pad” she could find and got on a plane to D.C.
She loaded her schedule with decoy dentist appointments to slip away for blood draws to test the level of pregnancy hormones, which continued to rise.
On May 31, back in Florida, a doctor found the embryo implanted where the fallopian tube meets the uterus, considered a cornual ectopic pregnancy. “If this ruptures, it’ll kill you,” he told her.
Medical professionals said surgery to remove the embryo put her at risk of losing her uterus. She opted for the shot of methotrexate, which blocks folic acid needed by the embryo to grow.
Her biggest takeaway: She was lucky to go through the ordeal with a network of people to lean on.
“What happens to women who don’t have a car? What happens to the women who don’t have their doctor’s cellphone number? Hell—do they have a doctor? What happens to them?” she said.
She wants other women who have an ectopic pregnancy to have hope. She said, “You start having some, you know, soul-searching moments of, ‘Can I get pregnant again?’ ”
She paused. Tears appeared in her eyes. “And you can,” she said through an exhale.
The politics of pregnancy
Cammack said she believes her perspective is an important counterweight on policy issues among House Republicans, where the average lawmaker age is nearly 60 and men outnumber women by around 6 to 1.
One of her male Republican colleagues “almost sunk under the table” when she mentioned breast-feeding to him recently. She also wishes they would stop touching her belly. “Like, please stop,” she said. “It’s so weird.”
As a member of the Committee on Energy and Commerce’s health subcommittee and founder of the Republican Women’s Caucus, she has criticized what she sees as low federal spending on research and development related to women’s health. She voted to pass President Trump’s tax and spending megabill but said concerns she had about its cuts potentially leading to hospital closures weren’t fully addressed.
Cammack said she has met with fertility-treatment companies that, like her, are worried about in vitro fertilization restrictions, and with Heidi Murkoff, the author of “What to Expect When You’re Expecting,” to discuss healthcare on military bases. She has pushed legislation to expand state investigations into maternal deaths.
Cammack is due in mid-August, during Congress’s scheduled monthlong recess. She said she could miss votes in late July if recommended by her doctor, and plans to be back after Labor Day. She said she didn’t support an idea, proposed by two female lawmakers who recently had babies, to allow new parents to vote remotely for a few weeks after birth.
“A lot of moms have to be right back to work,” she said. “I knew what I signed up for when I got elected.”
IJS
