Remember the story of Amber Thurman, the Georgia single mom who suffered horribly and died of sepsis in 2022 because her nurses and doctors were afraid of going to prison for performing an abortion-adjacent procedure on her to clear out infected, non-viable fetal tissue until it was too late?
Yeah Florida MAGA Congresswoman Kat Cammack tells the Wall Street Journal she was in a similar situation last year, that she was five weeks pregnant with a non-viable, ectopic embryo, and doctors feared going to prison if they gave her the necessary shot of methotrexate. She, just as Thurman had been two years earlier, was in a potentially fatal condition, arguing with the doctors and showing them to text of the Florida law to prove that this was “life of the mother” exception. She called heels-wearing Governor Ron DeSantis’s office but, according to Cammack, nobody picked up.
Doctors finally, for reasons unclear, relented a few hours later and gave her the shot.
Does Cammack blame DeSantis and Florida Republicans for signing the draconian law? Fuck no. She accuses “the left” of “absolute fearmongering at its worst,” that it was liberal propaganda that caused the staff at the hospital – which she won’t name – to believe they’d be prosecuted if they had given her the shot based on their own subjective call that her life was in danger. “There will be some comments like, ‘Well, thank God we have abortion services,’ even though what I went through wasn’t an abortion,” Cammack said, without noting that the law obviously treats what she went through as an abortion. She’s pregnant again and announced it recently at a White House event.
The right to life is the most sacred right afforded to us in the U.S.
I urge my colleagues to stand up for what is right in putting an end to the dangerous, immoral abortion practices that take place daily in our country.
Read more in @LifeNewsHQ ⬇️ https://t.co/f6LwvYm9Fa
— Kat Cammack (@Kat_Cammack) April 13, 2021
Cammack, 37, says she knew something was wrong before she even knew she was pregnant. She woke up in Florida on May 21, 2024, bleeding heavily and went to a doctor, who told her she was likely miscarrying but there was nothing to be done. So she flew to DC and, per the Journal, “loaded her schedule with decoy dentist appointments to slip away for blood draws to test the level of pregnancy hormones, which continued to rise.” Back home in Florida on the 31st, her doctor found a cornual ectopic pregnancy, telling her “If this ruptures, it’ll kill you.” Surgery would risk losing her uterus, so she went with the methotrexate shot – and hours of arguing with doctors over it.
The far right congresswoman credited the people around her with her and her uterus’s survival.
“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?” Cammack asked and it’s almost like she has no agency whatsoever to effect any change in policy for other women.
Unlimited abortion on-demand up until birth is on the Florida ballot as a Constitutional amendment this fall. Here are the highlights:
❌ No parental consent required for minors
❌ No physician required
❌ No limits on when a baby can be aborted
❌ No prohibitions on use of…— Kat Cammack (@Kat_Cammack) September 10, 2024
The hypocrisy and utter void of self-awareness are nothing surprising nor even shocking at this point. What really sticks out though is the timing and that this interview even happened at all. Now nobody should expect the Journal to divulge how and why they got this interview with Cammack, the secrets of the trade are sacrosanct when it comes to sourcing and provenance.
Still, it’s a hell of an interesting question given the very distinctly defensive and damage control-adjacent air of Cammack’s quotes here, how she blames “the left” for nearly getting her needlessly killed the way Amber Thurman was actually needlessly killed. Can anyone realistically imagine that Cammack would want to come forward with this given the politics involved? Is it maybe easier to picture happening is that some staffer in Cammack’s office mentioned the 2024 miscarriage to a staffer in someone else’s office who got it confused with her current 2025 pregnancy and mentioned it to a Journal reporter who called her office and asked if everything was okay and then Cammack decided to spin it best she could now at a remove from national elections?
Seems easier to see it having gone that way – or she just knew it was going to come up sooner or later so why not get it out of the way now. Equally easy to see is how much of a liability Cammack could’ve been for the party if her almost dying of an ectopic pregnancy directly because of Republican “pro-life” laws had been in the news last year, especially if it had come in September after ProPublica broke the story on Amber Thurman’s death. Would it have swung the election?
Probably not, but who really knows. It would however definitely have been a distraction Republicans did not need, so the GOP should be thanking Cammack for ripping this Band-Aid off halfway through the first year of this Congress to make sure it’s long buried and forgotten by the midterms.