I remember the day I heard about Dobbs. It was a summer morning during my final year of medical school. I’d awakened in the damp basement apartment I’d rented for a clinical rotation in Pittsburgh. As I scrolled through my news feed, my heart plummeted. There was a resigned and tacitly understood melancholy among the women in the hospital that day. A sisterhood predicated on shared despair was quietly forming during the upheaval of perceived judicial betrayal. Even those of us who barely knew each other might wearily exchange passing glances in the hallway, signaling, “Well, shit. Girl, I know. And it’ll only get worse.”
No woman may escape the cruelty of the nebulous and varying restrictions on reproductive healthcare in the post-Roe world—as Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.) discovered in May 2024 when faced with a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy shortly after Florida’s six-week abortion ban took effect. Concerned by the lack of clarity in the wording of the law on the limits of intervention in pregnant patients, doctors reportedly delayed administering intramuscular methotrexate to terminate the pregnancy, out of fear of prosecution. The state of Florida offered clarification to healthcare providers in September 2024.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Cammack stated her belief that liberal “fear-mongering” was predominantly responsible for doctors’ fear and the resultant delay in care that could have cost her her life.
While I’m sorry for the terror you experienced during an hour of desperate need, Rep. Cammack, I must fervently disagree that this vague spectre of The Left is what’s scaring doctors.
What truly terrifies us are real laws, real prosecutions and real threats that punish us for providing basic, necessary medical care.
You may meet me—a pro-choice psychiatrist-in-training from unapologetically blue New York—with skepticism, but I hope you, and other self-identified pro-life politicians, can appreciate the plea in this message. We have more in common than you might initially believe. We’re both professional women who want motherhood and who believe in protecting human lives and the betterment of our communities, though we may differ on the exact means of doing so.
I hope this may help you understand the post-Roe fear through my eyes—a view shared by many young female doctors.
The White House recently rescinded Biden-era federal guidelines on EMTALA regarding the stabilization of pregnant patients in emergency situations—just like yours, Rep. Cammack.
Case Studies: Threatening Doctors
State-sanctioned persecution of doctors in select, horrifying ordeals began almost immediately after Roe’s overturning.
Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita targeted Caitlin Bernard, M.D., weaponizing the state’s medical licensing board after she publicly referenced a chilling case in which she performed an abortion on a 10-year-old child from Ohio who had been raped. Dr. Bernard was fined and reprimanded, and the FBI warned her about a threat to kidnap her infant daughter in the chaos that her provision of compassionate care to a pediatric rape victim had borne. The professional and personal cost to Bernard has been profound.
Meanwhile, it is unclear what consequences the politicians—and some mainstream media, including The Wall Street Journal who described the rape-necessitating abortion as an “unlikely story from a biased source,” and Fox News who questioned the story’s veracity—who went after Bernard experienced. Although WSJ corrected the record when the alleged rapist was arrested, the contrition comes across as disingenuous, given the aggressive, cocksure tone of the original piece. And Rokita’s success in punishing Bernard sent the message that intimidating physicians for doing their jobs is acceptable.
Antiabortion politicians in other states seemed emboldened to target individual physicians upon the overturn of Roe. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton honed in on Kate Cox as though her case were a personal vendetta, threatening her care team with criminal charges, even after a judge had determined that Cox could receive an abortion, given the fatal fetal anomaly complicating her pregnancy and threatening her health and future fertility.
Earlier this year, a Louisiana grand jury criminally indicted Margaret Carpenter, M.D., a New York physician, for allegedly prescribing abortion pills to a pregnant minor from Louisiana—where there are no exceptions to the state’s abortion ban for rape or incest—though Dr. Carpenter was operating in her home state under New York’s shield law. If convicted under Louisiana’s law, Carpenter faces up to 15 years in prison, $200,000 in fines and loss of her medical license.
The White House recently rescinded Biden-era federal guidelines on EMTALA regarding the stabilization of pregnant patients in emergency situations—just like yours, Rep. Cammack. Taken with the events outlined above, this move has added to the confusion. There’s a menacing aura to it: that providing care that could remotely be considered an abortion, even in an emergency, could make doctors political targets.
Why I Fear for my Colleagues
As I watched these cases unfold, I concluded that politicians can circumvent medical autonomy, legal abortion ban exceptions and judicial orders to target doctors. It was terrifying. You might say, “Of course, treatment of ectopic pregnancy isn’t abortion!” True, but we also never thought miscarriages could be criminally investigated, or emergency contraception could be vilified as an abortifacient (despite evidence to the contrary) … yet here we are. This bullying tries to govern medicine without nuance, and our profession is nuance.
So, forgive us for our abundance of caution. In this chaotic landscape, where reproductive healthcare policy and medical reality appear woefully divorced, we don’t know what misstep could land us in senseless litigation or with felony charges.
Please understand what we could lose. Each pathway into medicine is marked by years of sacrifice and six figures of debt. Over 15 years, I endured sleepless nights, missed significant moments in my loved ones’ lives, and delayed life milestones. I regret nothing about my professional choices. Though the hours are long, I have a very active social life. I also do not own a cat, despite the absurd narrative that some conservative activists spitefully peddle about female physicians. I wouldn’t trade my job for the world.
I also wouldn’t do anything that could jeopardize it—nor would most other physicians. Risk aversion and medicine often go hand-in-hand.
Can you possibly understand how doctors nationwide might interpret the events I outlined earlier? These are not vague threats exaggerated by “The Left,” but real actions of specific individuals apparently driven by extreme ideology who dismiss our expertise and can successfully put us through hell. Of course we’re scared.
You might say, ‘Of course, treatment of ectopic pregnancy isn’t abortion!’ True, but we also never thought miscarriages could be criminally investigated, or emergency contraception could be vilified as an abortifacient …
Women’s Lives Are No Longer a Priority
Physicians cannot separate our work from the larger sociopolitical context of our nation. As a young doctor, I’ve observed two particularly alarming phenomena since 2025 began: the systemic devaluation of both medical science and of women’s lives.
With non-experts in positions of massive influence—like head of HHS and Surgeon General—successfully crowding out our voices, we seem to garner little power and respect today.
And I need not comment substantially on the exploding cultural misogyny of the times—from politicians, including our president, with allegations or convictions of sexual misconduct actively in power; to the mass pardoning of the Jan. 6 rioters, many of whom have records of domestic violence, rape and sexual abuse of a minor; to the sinister manosphere. And more.
This devaluation of women intersects dangerously with reproductive healthcare policy. The mounting evidence of widespread harm to women is too substantive to ignore. In states with draconian abortion restrictions, miscarriages were criminalized and maternal sepsis rates skyrocketed. Even when rape exceptions were in place, rape survivors did not seem to have reasonable access to abortion. Pregnancy transformed from a choice to a potential death sentence.
These outcomes are not “pro-life”—since Dobbs, women in states with abortion bans were found to be twice as likely to die during pregnancy, childbirth and postpartum compared to women in states with abortion protections and early data from the National Bureau of Economic Research reveal a significant increase in rates of intimate partner violence for reproductive-aged women in areas with the most stringent abortion bans. Yet “pro-life” politicians double down on their efforts. We’re trying to tell you how scared we are for our female patients, but it feels like no one is listening.
We’re up against an outright mean-spirited cultural climate that equates callousness with strength and belittles empathy, fosters bullying violence, and diminishes women. Of course, in this willfully unkind and misogynistic climate—where doctors face additional challenges of legal threats, confusing restrictions, and undermining of their expertise—women’s lives are not a priority.
Did you think you would be an exception, Rep. Cammack? That if you “did everything right” as a woman, this wouldn’t happen to you?
I don’t mean that condescendingly; I thought that way once. Raised very conservative, a Sunday school teacher, who invested heavily in my education and can keep a home quite well, if I do say so myself, I molded myself into the ideal woman, naively certain that life-altering terror couldn’t find me if I lived a Christ-like life. I was wrong. None of us is exempt from cruel circumstance.
This vicious culture, hiding under a vapid veneer of “pro-life” hurts you as much as it hurts every other woman. I’ve seen the “FAFO” memes online about you and read about the threats you’ve encountered since publicly airing your story. I’m sorry for the vitriol, and would encourage activists in the pro-choice camp to offer more kindness.
But I would also encourage you not to fan the flames of political polarization and to appreciate the true roots of doctors’ fears in the post-Roe world with intellectual honesty.
My voice counts for relatively little. But Rep. Cammack, your voice and your story have power. I hope you use them to reintroduce nuance and common sense to the discussion on women’s lives. There are many of us who will extend a hand across the aisle and work together with you to right some of the senseless wrongs.
Great Job Chloe Nazra Lee & the Team @ Ms. Magazine Source link for sharing this story.
