In May 2024, Kat Cammack was five weeks pregnant when doctors found the pregnancy was ectopic and her life was at risk. The emergency room decided she needed surgery or a shot of methotrexate.

Then it waited.

By her own account, the doctors hesitated because they "were worried about losing their licenses or going to jail." She looked up Florida's statute on her phone. She called Gov. Ron DeSantis's office. Hours later she got the drug.

She blamed abortion-rights activists. "It was absolute fearmongering at its worst," she said.

Remember that phrase — worried about losing their licenses or going to jail — because on April 30, 2026, Cammack introduced a bill designed to make exactly that fear a federal reality.

What the bill does

The Dismemberment Abortion Ban Act of 2026, H.R. 8603, is Cammack's bill. She is the lead sponsor, joined by Pro-Life Caucus co-chair Bob Onder and 17 cosponsors, with a Senate companion from Mike Rounds and Cindy Hyde-Smith.

Her own press release states the target plainly. The bill establishes a federal prohibition on "dismemberment abortions, including dilation and evacuation procedures."

Dilation and evacuation — D&E — is not an exotic procedure. It is the standard method of second-trimester abortion in the United States. Sen. Rounds, arguing for the bill in that same press release, put the share at "around 80% of second trimester abortions."

The penalty, from the bill text itself: any physician who knowingly performs one "shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 2 years, or both."

The exceptions that aren't there

Read the exceptions carefully, because this is where a bill's real content lives.

The ban does not apply to a procedure "necessary to save the life of a mother whose life is endangered by a physical disorder, physical illness, or physical injury."

That is a life exception. It is not a health exception. A patient facing organ damage, loss of fertility, or a serious non-fatal complication is not covered. Neither is a mental-health crisis — the word "physical" is in the text three times to make sure of it.

On rape and incest, the bill contains this rule of construction:

"Nothing in this section shall be construed to limit abortions performed for any reason, including when the pregnancy is a result of rape or incest, if performed by a method other than dismemberment abortion."

That sentence is written to sound like an exception. It isn't one. It says a rape survivor may still have an abortion — just not by the method that 80% of second-trimester abortions use. For a 14-year-old who did not realize she was pregnant until the second trimester, "you may use a different method" is the answer, and the bill does not say what that method is.

And it hands a lawsuit to the parent

Section (c) creates civil remedies. The patient can sue. So can "a parent of a minor upon whom an abortion has been performed."

Sit with that. A 17-year-old in a state where abortion is legal obtains a second-trimester abortion. Under this bill, her parent — who may be the reason she didn't tell anyone — gets a federal cause of action against the doctor, with "objectively verifiable money damages," statutory damages of three times the cost of the abortion, punitive damages, and attorney's fees.

The doctor faces prison from the government and a lawsuit from the family, and the plaintiff's lawyer gets paid either way.

Which brings us back to Cammack's own emergency room

Cammack's position on her ectopic pregnancy has been consistent: the law was fine, the doctors were confused, and the confusion was manufactured by her political opponents. Florida's law, as reported at the time, "does not ban the treatment of ectopic pregnancies and considers them an emergency and not an abortion." Florida later had to issue formal guidance to providers about ectopic pregnancies anyway — because the doctors were, in fact, uncertain.

So Cammack has firsthand knowledge of a specific mechanism: when a state writes criminal penalties around obstetric care, doctors slow down. Not because they are confused about politics — because they are calculating the risk of a felony against the risk of a delay. She was the patient lying there while they calculated.

Her response to learning that is a bill that adds a federal criminal penalty on top of the state ones. Two years. For the procedure used in most second-trimester abortions. With a life exception that requires a physical condition and no health exception at all.

Doctors would have two governments to be afraid of instead of one.

Her framing for it: "Under our current system, abortion procedures exist in a legal gray area with no federal standards and no accountability. Providers can perform inhumane extraction methods and face zero consequences. That ends now." She adds that the bill "ensures women are protected, not prosecuted."

Women are not prosecuted under it. That is true, and it is beside the point. The people who provide the care are, and the care disappears when the providers do.

This is not her first federal ban

Cammack is a co-chair of the House Pro-Life Caucus. She was one of the original cosponsors of a bill making it a federal crime to perform an abortion at 15 weeks or later — a nationwide ban that would have overridden any state where voters chose broader protections.

The through-line matters. Whatever her district decides, whatever Florida decides, whatever any state decides, Cammack's project is a federal floor beneath which no state may go. We've written about the broader plan to make Dobbs "permanent in every single state" — Cammack's bill is a working piece of it, not a symbolic gesture.

Source

Rep. Cammack Leads Bill to Ban Barbaric Abortion Procedures — cammack.house.gov, April 30, 2026, and the text of H.R. 8603. Photo: AP via WLRN.