Texas ‘Fixed’ Its Abortion Law. She Was Still Turned Away From Two Hospitals.

I am writing to urge you to co-sponsor and vote in favor of the Women’s Health Protection Act (S. 2150 / H.R. 12), federal legislation to establish a baseline of medical care that does not disappear at a state line. In June 2026, Lynn Callaway went to two different emergency rooms in Austin, Texas while miscarrying and developing a dangerous infection. Both times, she says, she was refused the abortion-inducing medication or procedure she needed to end the miscarriage safely. She endured the rest of it at home, bleeding and feverish, while her young son watched. This happened after Texas passed the Life of the Mother Act, a 2025 reform that passed with overwhelming bipartisan support specifically to fix confusion over the state’s medical emergency exception. The fix did not work for her. If a state’s own good-faith attempt at clarity still leaves a woman turned away twice while septic, the problem is not one state’s specific wording. When doctors face criminal prosecution, hospital legal counsel will always force medicine to default to caution over patient care. Callaway’s case is not an outlier. Journalists have identified at least nine women, including Amber Nicole Thurman in Georgia and Josseli Barnica in Texas, who died after doctors delayed or withheld standard treatment for fear of criminal liability under their state’s abortion law. State maternal mortality review boards have found some of these deaths preventable. Even these documented deaths represent only the sharpest edge of a much broader, underreported crisis. For every case that makes national headlines or appears before a maternal mortality review board, countless other women are surviving with permanent physical trauma: lost fertility, emergency hysterectomies, sepsis-induced organ damage, and chronic pain because care was delayed until they were at death’s door. State laws that treat women’s health and future well-being as collateral damage force patients to endure preventable suffering that no standard of modern medicine would ever condone. A patient’s location should not determine whether a doctor is legally free to treat her. Today it does: the same infection, the same miscarriage, the same emergency can be routine care in one state and a felony risk for the treating physician in another. This isn’t really about state versus federal control - it’s about whether emergency medicine stays emergency medicine everywhere. The Women’s Health Protection Act would set a federal floor: it protects a doctor’s ability to provide, and a patient’s ability to receive, medically necessary care without a legislature or a prosecutor second-guessing the exam room after the fact. It does not require any state to change how it funds or promotes abortion access beyond that floor - it requires that women in medical emergencies get treated like medical emergencies, not potential crime scenes. I urge you to co-sponsor and support a vote on the Women’s Health Protection Act, and to publicly address what accountability exists for emergency rooms that turn away patients like Lynn Callaway in medical crisis. Women should not have to sue the state to find out whether their doctor is legally allowed to save their life.