Congresswoman Kat Cammack Told Me This Story. Then She Asked Me Not to Publish It.

The pro-life Florida politician nearly died during a pregnancy emergency that required an abortion. After she told me what happened, she asked me not to publish it.

Welcome back to The Red Letter.

I thought I knew where this interview was going.

Kat Cammack, a Republican congresswoman from Florida’s 3rd District who proudly displayed a red MAGA hat during our interview, had reached out weeks earlier through her staff to talk about sexual misconduct in Congress on The Tara Palmeri Show. It was a topic I was eager to dig into with a GOP lawmaker who has championed accountability on Capitol Hill while continuing to support President Trump, who has been accused of sexual misconduct by at least 26 women.

But before we sat down, my producer Abi Baker sent me an article about something else entirely: a pregnancy complication that had nearly killed her.

After getting through out questions about corruption in Congress, I asked about it, expecting a polished political answer.

Instead, I watched a member of Congress break-down crying as she described what it felt like to sit in a hospital bed, fearing she might die while nurses, doctors, and administrators debated whether they could treat her.

"Politics has really really endangered a lot of women's lives," Cammack told me.

By the end of the conversation, I found myself thinking differently about the issue.

Then, after we stopped recording, she asked me not to air it.

I had read about Cammack’s experience before. It wasn’t new information. She had spoken publicly about it. There were news stories. Political arguments. Opinion articles. The usual outrage from both sides.

But hearing her tell the story herself moved me.

For the first time, I wasn’t hearing a debate about abortion policy. I was hearing a woman describe what it felt like to believe she might die. A woman with incredible power, helpless on a hospital bed.

And selfishly, perhaps, I thought about myself.

At 38, Cammack and I are the same age. If I decide to have children, I could face many of the same risks and complications that come with pregnancy later in life. Suddenly this wasn't a theoretical debate anymore. It was one I could imagine living through myself.

She talked about hemorrhaging. About being told her pregnancy was ectopic and potentially fatal. About sitting in a hospital room while medical professionals debated whether they could provide treatment because they feared the legal consequences.

She knew the law. She’s a member of Congress. She knew Florida’s six-week abortion heartbeat law contained exceptions for the life of the mother.

And yet there she was, reading the law herself to hospital staff while asking her husband to Google how long it takes to die from internal bleeding.

I found that remarkable.

What struck me most was that we came away from the same story with very different conclusions.

Cammack believes the problem was misinformation. She told me a nurse showed her an advertisement claiming doctors and nurses could face legal consequences for treating women experiencing miscarriages or ectopic pregnancies. In her view, activists and advocacy groups had created fear where none should have existed.

She saw liberal actors exploiting fear.

I saw a law that created the conditions for that fear to flourish.

Because if the law was so clear, why was there confusion at all?

Why were doctors consulting administrators?

Why were administrators reviewing policies?

Why was a woman facing a life-threatening medical emergency waiting while people sorted through legal questions?

Those questions stayed with me long after the interview ended.

I told her during our conversation that after hearing her story, I would be nervous about being pregnant in Florida.

Like a good politician, she pushed back.

Florida is a great state, she told me. The real problem is America’s broken healthcare system.

Maybe she’s right.

Certainly the healthcare system deserves scrutiny.

But I couldn’t shake the larger question.

If a member of Congress with access to doctors, lawyers, and political connections found herself in that situation, what happens to the woman who doesn’t? In the middle of the emergency, she called the Governor’s office to request a lawyer.

But what happens to the woman who doesn’t know the law?

What happens to the woman who doesn’t have the confidence to challenge the people treating her?

What happens to the woman who simply assumes the people in charge know what they’re doing?

After the interview ended, I thanked Cammack for sharing her story.

Then she asked me not to publish it.

She told me she had already spoken publicly about the experience and worried that airing the interview would generate renewed attention and fresh threats against her family.

I took that request seriously.

I spend much of my career dealing with sensitive subjects and vulnerable people. Protecting sources matters. Context matters. Humanity matters.

But Congresswoman Cammack is not a private citizen.

She’s a public official. The interview was on the record. And more importantly, I believed the conversation was in the public interest.

Not because it settled the debate. It didn’t.

If anything, it highlighted just how differently reasonable people can interpret the same experience.

But it forced me to think about the distance between a law written on paper and how that law is experienced in real life.

It forced me to think about bureaucracy.

About fear.

About confusion.

About how quickly medical emergencies can become political ones.

Most of all, it reminded me that behind every policy debate is a human being.

That’s why I decided to publish it.

I’m curious to hear what you think.

Here’s our conversation.

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TARA PALMERI: I do want to talk about something that you’ve spoken publicly about. It’s an extremely vulnerable moment in your life, and I applaud you for doing that because I know it’s not easy, but you know, you suffered a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy, and you had to make a decision to terminate that pregnancy to save your own life. What was that like?

REP. KAT CAMMACK: Oh, awful, heartbreaking. I mean, there was no heartbeat. The doctors told me, it took about 10 days to actually figure out really what was going on. At first, they thought that I was just miscarrying because I was hemorrhaging so much. So literally within the first minute of finding out I was pregnant, I immediately thought I was miscarrying.

The doctors, when I went in and they said, ‘Well, there’s really nothing you can do, you’ve probably miscarried.’ ‘So just you’re going to have to go on about your day.’ And I mean that to me was just — holy [expletive].

They kept doing the blood tests to try to figure out what was going on. And they finally with some ultrasounds were able to figure out that it was an ectopic pregnancy, a corneal, which is one of the rarest that you can have and one of the most dangerous.

Like I said, it was about 5 weeks along. They couldn’t detect a heartbeat. And they said that given where it was, because the the hCG levels were continuing to rise, it would eventually rupture and it would cause internal bleeding and there was a very real risk of dying.

And so that’s when they told me like, you have to go now. You got to go to the ER. And they gave me two options. They said you can either do the surgery which because of where this ectopic is you will likely lose your uterus or you can do a shot of methotrexate which is a cancer drug. And the whole deal with methotrexate was it stops the chemical from continuing to produce.

I go into the ER, and they bring me back, and then all of a sudden it was like, “Wait, we have questions.”

And I’m like, “Oh boy.”

That started me down a path of really understanding, one, how broken the system is and, two, how politics has really really endangered a lot of women’s lives in very vulnerable moments.

Florida has the heart heartbeat protection act law. Cannot get an abortion after six weeks. No medical abortions that are sent in the mail. If your doctor wants to get you a medical abortion, they can. But it has to be life because you know threatening to your life essentially. That’s why you need it. And you can get an abortion up to 15 weeks, which is about well whatever four months in in cases of rape, incest or human trafficking. But again, you have to provide documentation like a restraining order or a police report, which a lot of women don’t obviously feel comfortable doing, especially in cases of incest, rape, um, and trafficking, which would endanger their lives in some cases.

I mean, when you met that resistance with doctors, did you think to yourself, ‘we got to change this law?’ You’re an educated, eloquent congresswoman.

Imagine if you didn’t know the law. you were just a regular person perhaps for coming from a disadvantaged background, you get the same sort of diagnosis. How do you convince your doctors that it’s worth the penalty? I mean, they could be fined, $5,000, they can lose their medical license, that it’s worth it to risk their professions to save your life.

CAMMACK: So, in my case, and I know there’s been a lot of different circumstances that women have faced on this, the entire time, from the minute I took that pregnancy test to the minute I found myself in the ER, I kept telling my husband: “What about the women who don’t have a doctor? What about the women who don’t have a car to get to the ER?”

I must have asked him that question 30 times.

As I was in the ER, the nurse who was um taking care of us, she was, you know, very kind and she said, “Listen, there there’s going to be a bit of a delay. There’s some stuff that admin has to figure out.” And I said, “What’s going on?” And she said, “Well, um, according to the law, if we give you a shot of methotrexate, we are going to be held liable, and the doctor is very concerned.”

And I said, “I’m well, one, I’m 5 weeks. The law says six, and I’m 5 weeks, there is no heartbeat, and this is very clearly a, you know, danger to the life of the mother situation.” And she said, “Oh, no, no, I know that.”

But she turned and then she takes her phone and she shows me an advertisement um that was from a group that said that any nurse, technician, doctor um that had helped any woman who was miscarrying or having a topic um that they would go to jail. And it was an advertisement that she had screenshotted. And I sat there in disbelief.

My husband saw it, and I said, “You’ve got to be effing kidding me.” And I looked at the group, and it was a pro-abortion group that was against the Florida law. And come to find out, I didn’t know this then. I found out, you know, weeks later that they had been geofencing around hospitals and um any system that um they could to scare doctors and nurses away from providing care for women in crisis. And um it got so bad that many many months down the road um the state of Florida actually threatened to sue the group in order to get the the ads taken down. Um, and it was a multi-million dollar buy that they spent in digital advertisements, geo fencing around these hospitals and these clinics and um, trying to scare people.

Now, in that case, I’m sitting there thinking, what in the heck is like the law is very clear. I actually pulled up my phone. And I was reading the law to one of the hospital administrators and the nurse and the doctor right there in the room and they said we understand but we’ve got to do some checking before we do anything.

And I’m like if I bleed out like how long – I asked my husband like please Google how long does it take to die if you have internal bleeding? And that was a very very stressful situation and at that point I’m just like what in the heck?

Now I have been mercilessly attacked. To the point of multiple I’m I’m talking dozens and dozens of death threats from people around the country because I’ve told this story. Um you know, everyone says I called the governor and got an exception.

Total [expletive]. That’s such a lie. It’s 11:30 at night. I called the governor’s office, not the governor, the governor’s office to try to get legal counsel from their office on the phone because there was no one else I could call to have them explain to the doctors, to the hospital administrators that the law in fact said one, life of the mother, rape, incest, and this was clearly life of the mother situation.

Two, there was no heartbeat. My baby had died. I had no chance of this being a viable pregnancy. Um, and after I told this story, I cannot tell you how many people came out and like I said, mercilessly, horrifically attacked me to this day. I mean, I get it from people all over because they don’t know the facts and they don’t want to know the facts.

They are either pro-life or pro-choice. Um, one of the things that was really frustrating to me was, people thought it was the pro-life community that was attacking me. It actually was the pro-choice community that came out and said, “This is this is what happens. You know, you should have died. You should have bled out. You should have done all these things.

They’ve um, you know, threatened my daughter, you know, and it’s just it’s a really sad situation because the entire time I was going through that, I kept asking, “What about the women who don’t have doctors? What about the women who don’t have resources?

It was very clear in that moment that whether you’re pro-life or you’re pro-choice, the politics around this issue are hurting women. I don’t care what side you find yourself on, the politics around this are hurting women.

And it was something that put me down a path of I literally rent went and read all 50 states’ laws that are on the books, and not one says that you cannot help a woman in the case of life of the mother in jeopardy. And that to me is something that has gotten lost in translation in the politics.

First of all, that is a horrible situation and I really I can only imagine what that was like. So, I’m so sorry you went through that. But I just want to pull back a little bit, from there.

Yes. I think the disinformation campaign is horrible, right? It’s obviously intended to confuse, create chaos, and show the weakness in the law, right? Or at least the impression that these laws haven’t been properly communicated to hospitals. the people who are in charge of this have not been you know trained they haven’t received you know they don’t have awareness from even the government the administrators and why do you have to go through an administrative process before in a life-threatening situation like I’m pretty sure if I showed up in the ER with you know a heart attack nobody’s going to have to like check the law to make sure they have to they can you know put you I don’t know what you do exactly to save someone from a heart attack but the point is to go into life-saving mode.

So clearly there are some flaws in this law, but I mean you have to understand that a law that has a penalty like that is going to breed disinformation, whether it’s accurate or not. And so I mean do does it make you at least want to rethink these abortion laws in some way? I mean the fact that they can be so easily manipulated.

CAMMACK: Yeah, I mean I think um there’s a couple of things here. um after that experience, but then of course I’ll get emotional here. Give me a second.

It’s okay. You went through something that I hope most women never face; it’s a horrible experience.

CAMMACK: Oh, you got me good on this one.

After that. After our rainbow baby, Auggie after she was born. I mean talking about how I look at the situation. Protecting life is it is the realest issue for me. I think that situation and the birth of my daughter definitely has made me more of an advocate for life.

I do think, and this is beyond this issue. Women’s health care has been reduced to this issue and maybe one or two others. And it is a horrible disservice to women because there are so many things that are unique to women and women’s healthcare that don’t get addressed because of some reason or another. And in talking about the way that these are written and these are communicated, we absolutely have to do a better job, and we have to understand the danger of playing politics with issues like this because it’s real people’s lives.

You know, the fact that I have to have a deputy parked in my driveway 24/7 because I was willing to share my story is ridiculous. I know that there are women who have gone through similar situations in different parts of the country that had a different outcome, they had a different set of circumstances.

And we should be willing to talk about the situations and these circumstances and these experiences without fear of someone threatening your life.

The issue it’s really tough. It is a tough issue. I would say that there is a way that we as women, um, and I think it’s it has to be women because we are uniquely, we are uniquely positioned to talk about this, can come together and talk about ways that we can protect women and we can protect kids.

I think that can happen, but we have to be willing to stop immediately assuming that the headline tells the whole story.

I came forward to tell my story because I wanted one woman, if just even one woman felt a little bit less alone. It would have been worth it.

But I found that there’s a reason why women don’t tell their stories. I mean, this is an existential crisis that we’re going through right now for a lot of people. And I wish it wasn’t this way.

I think when you’re fighting for women, whether you like the term or not, I would put you in the feminist bucket

CAMMACK: I don’t think the feminist movement would appreciate that.

Well, I appreciate your honesty. I’m sure you know, everyone is going to have a different take on your experience. I’m sorry that you faced violence because of that and threats. There’s no excuse for that in public discourse. And I’m really happy though that you have a daughter now and you have a great family and I’m really excited to see what you do in Washington cleaning it up. See how it goes. I hope there’s political will behind it.

CAMMACK: I think there is the political will to clean it up. I really do. I think that there is a tide that is turning where people are starting to see in many ways less of the political labels and more of the ‘hey I feel like this is the right thing to do’ so we need to do this because it is something that transcends politics and whether we’re talking about women and women’s healthcare or we’re talking about getting the creeps out of Congress I think that you’ll find that to be true.

I will say that after hearing your story, it would terrify me to have a child in Florida. I hate to say it.

CAMMACK: It shouldn’t. It shouldn’t. Florida’s a great place.

I know. Hearing that I’m just like, wait, what? It would really, really, really terrify me.

CAMMACK: No, I don’t think so. I mean like I said that situation that I faced was that was a very deliberate campaign that was they intended to inspire fear and they achieved it, they achieved their goal.

Like I said, it blows my mind to this day that we can’t even have a conversation about what I mean and and I’ll even say I mean treatment for miscarriages and ectopics and again I continually get attacked for this but you know follow the science you know it’s not classified as abortion and you know that’s another thing is you conflate terms people they continue to conflate terms and, you know, use misinformation and disinformation and it’s deliberate. And who gets hurt in the end? It’s it’s women. It’s women. It’s kids. And I think when um when we’re talking about how do we protect people?

It’s just look at the facts. Just look at the facts. And in the case of Florida, the facts were there.

Whatever the time is for the admin, who knows? I mean, there everyone’s been in a situation in life where admin in a hospital in a medical situation just takes a long time whether you’re in the waiting room or you’re trying to get your referral or you’re waiting but imagining that sort of admin whether it’s over disinformation or it’s getting the checks or looking at the law like that would just like scare me. I I have to admit it, like that would terrify me that I would have to go through that process.

CAMMACK: I’ll tell you, the health care system should scare everyone because it is completely fundamentally broken. And I know that’s a topic for another day, but I mean, you could take this issue, you could take a million different issues.

We don’t have a health care system in the country. We’ve got a sick care system. And that is one thing that I know Republicans and Democrats and independents, we all agree that the system is broken. And it should terrify every single one of us. Um, how bad it has gotten. So, I’ll say the health care system should scare you, not Florida.

Yeah, the health care system is pretty terrifying everywhere.

CAMMACK: It is. It is.

But add in some laws on top of the bureaucracy and I’m just like — but I appreciate your candor and I appreciate your honesty and I’m really I’m sorry you had to go through that. You know, it takes a lot of bravery to tell your story. So, thank you for telling it.

CAMMACK: Well, I appreciate the time. Thank you.