A Republican congresswoman from Florida says she evacuated her offices after receiving death threats for speaking out about doctors who denied her emergency pregnancy care because they feared violating a strict abortion law. U.S. Rep. Kat Cammack blamed the doctors’ hesitancy — and the threats — on misinformation from abortion-rights advocates.
“Today we had to evacuate our offices due to imminent death threats against me, my unborn child, my family, and my staff,” Cammack, who expects to deliver her first child in August, wrote Wednesday, June 25, on X.
The evacuations took place in Cammack’s offices in Gainesville and Ocala, Florida, according to WCJB-TV in Gainesville. They occurred three days after The Wall Street Journal published a story about Cammack’s experience during an earlier pregnancy.
‘If this ruptures, it’ll kill you’
Cammack told the Journal she was about five weeks pregnant when doctors discovered a life-threatening complication in May 2024. They diagnosed her with an ectopic pregnancy, with the embryo implanted where the fallopian tube connects to the uterus. Such pregnancies cannot be carried to term, according to the Mayo Clinic.
“If this ruptures, it’ll kill you,” Cammack said a doctor told her.
Cammack needed a shot of methotrexate, an anti-inflammatory drug often used to expel embryos in ectopic pregnancies, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.
However, she said doctors and nurses were afraid of losing their licenses if they helped her end her pregnancy. A Florida law banning most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy had gone into effect earlier the same month. She declined to identify the hospital, the Journal reported.
Cammack showed doctors the new law, which did not define ectopic pregnancy, on her phone. She tried to call Gov. Ron DeSantis’ office, but no one answered. Finally, she said, doctors relented and administered the medication to end her pregnancy.
‘Fearmongering at its worst’
Cammack blamed abortion-rights advocates for scaring medical professionals about the consequences of violating Florida’s abortion law.
“It was absolute fearmongering at its worst,” she said. “There will be some comments like, ‘Well, thank God we have abortion services,’ even though what I went through wasn’t an abortion.”
Cammack, 37, who was first elected to Congress in 2020, chairs the House Pro-Life Caucus but supports exceptions to strict abortion laws in reported cases of rape or incest in the first trimester or when a mother’s life is at risk.
Despite her opposition to abortion, she said, “I would stand with any woman — Republican or Democrat — and fight for them to be able to get care in a situation where they were experiencing a miscarriage and an ectopic” pregnancy.
“What happens to women who don’t have a car?” Cammack asked. “What happens to the women who don’t have their doctor’s cellphone number? Hell – do they have a doctor? What happens to them?”
Florida health officials later told the state’s doctors they should intervene in cases like Cammack’s.
But Dr. Alison Haddock, president of the American College of Emergency Physicians, told the Journal that early pregnancy care is a “medically complicated space” requiring clinical judgment that doctors fear could be challenged in court.
“This has been a real stress point for a lot of our physicians,” Haddock said.
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The U.S. Capitol Police investigated 9,474 threats and “concerning statements” against members of Congress, their families and staff in 2024 — a 140% increase since 2017.
Threats under investigation
After the Journal article was published, many abortion-rights supporters depicted Cammack as a hypocrite for supporting laws that could deny other women the reproductive care she received.
“She deserves the same treatment that any woman with an ectopic pregnancy in Florida is getting, no mercy,” one Journal reader commented.
Cammack says other responses threatened violence. On X, she shared a post that said, “Count your days, fat a– b—-”
Another X user wrote that it was “too bad” her current pregnancy “wasn’t ectopic as well. I wish you would have been left to bleed to death in a hospital bed and in your last moments of life perhaps you would have had clarity as to the fact that the end of your road was the end result of your insane ideology.”
Cammack wrote on X that she had received “thousands of hate-filled messages and dozens of credible threats from pro-abortion activists” since the Journal article appeared. She did not share any messages with specific threats.
In a statement to Straight Arrow News, the Capitol Police acknowledged it is investigating threats against Cammack, saying it has a “zero-tolerance policy for threats against members of Congress.”
In this case, “our Tampa field office, which was set up to quickly respond to threats in the region, immediately started coordinating with local and federal agencies in the area,” a Capitol Police spokesperson said in an email. “We appreciate their partnership as we continue to investigate this case. For safety reasons, we cannot discuss the specifics about our investigations.”
The threats against Cammack came less than a week after a Republican congressman from Ohio said he was run off the road by a man who threatened to kill him and his family. That incident occurred five days after a gunman assassinated a Minnesota state legislator and her husband and wounded another lawmaker and his wife.
Capitol Police have investigated 9,474 threats and “concerning statements” against members of Congress, their families and their staffs in 2024 — 140% more than in 2017.
