A Catholic ER physician with decades of experience told CatholicVote that Amendment 4, the proposed pro-abortion amendment on Florida’s November 5 ballot, would have serious ramifications for the health of the state’s women and children if it passes with 60% of the vote in less than three weeks.
Dr. Anthony Pohlgeers is a recently retired Pediatric Emergency Medicine Specialist who practiced at Wolfson Children’s Hospital in Jacksonville, Florida, for 30 years.
“It was just a fantastic career and I loved every minute of it,” he said.
In an exclusive CatholicVote interview, the doctor explained how the amendment would open the door for non-physicians to perform abortions in Florida, how it would eliminate parental consent, and how false pro-abortion narratives disseminated by its proponents are causing irreparable harm to the very women they purport to help.
Furthermore, Pohlgeers explained how his strong Catholic faith compelled him to join a steadily growing coalition of doctors speaking out against the amendment.
“Part of being Catholic, we have a responsibility,” he said. “We can’t remain silent. We have an obligation to be the people that stand up and say, ‘Okay. What are we doing here?’”
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‘Just doesn’t make sense’
The retired physician noted that “there’s a lot of people out there including those sitting in the pew that do believe that abortion should be something that is available to women.”
However, he pointed out that “most people agree that there should be some limitation” on the legality of abortion. That’s “how we come around to getting laws” on the books like Florida’s current pro-life Heartbeat Protection Act (2023), which protects most unborn children after six weeks of gestation.
He also highlighted Florida Statutes Chapter 390, which places several restrictions on abortions being performed in the state.
Pohlgeers said that prior to Florida’s 2023 pro-life law going into effect, “the majority of elective abortions were occurring prior to six weeks.”
“So, why is it suddenly that they want to claim that it’s too early?” he asked. “It just doesn’t make sense to me.”
How Amendment 4 would affect doctors
Pohlgeers said that if Amendment 4 is passed it will “certainly weaken” the requirement in current Florida law that abortion be performed by licensed physicians.
The doctor contrasted the amendment with Chapter 390, which includes the word “physician” dozens of times throughout its various sections.
“The entire Amendment 4 is only 34 words,” he said. “It never mentions ‘physician’ once.”
Rather than use the word “physician” or “doctor,” the amendment instead vaguely states that if it is approved by 60% of Florida voters, abortion is to be performed by a “healthcare provider.”
“The bottom line is that it doesn’t define it,” he said. “The [current] law clearly defines” who can perform abortions.
Amendment 4’s full text is:
Except as provided in Article X, Section 22, no law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider.
Over a dozen states – almost all of them blue states – currently allow non-physicians to legally abort unborn children.
A ‘healthcare provider’
In addition, Pohlgeers stated that he was concerned by the amendment’s use of the word “or” twice in its brief text.
“When you have ‘or’ in something, that changes everything from that word backwards,” he emphasized.
He specifically singled out the phrase “or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider.”
“The current law is very clear,” Pohlgeers said, again contrasting it with Amendment 4. “It’s life-threatening or organ-threatening to the mother.”
“It’s not a matter of ‘Is their health at risk?’ It’s their life,” he noted. “And that’s different.”
“Who is determining” this risk, he asked:
In Amendment 4 it says it’s determined by a “healthcare provider,” which they do not define. So, who could that be?
We don’t know, because they didn’t define it. When you ask them, they just look at you and say, ‘Well, it’s a healthcare provider.’ And they dodge around the question.
“You can ask them point blank, which I have done,” Pohlgeers said.
He went on to discuss how this vague term has the potential to cause tragic consequences for women who would receive abortions in Florida under the amendment.
“Do you want to see a doctor when you go into the emergency room if your life is in jeopardy?” Pohlgeers asked. “Or do you want to see the tech up front or the clerk that is checking you in?”
“The patient has a certain expectation that if they’re dying, they’re going to have a doctor at their bedside,” he said. “That’s [what] I try to drive home to people when I’m talking about this amendment.”
“And that scares me,” the doctor added. “Because it doesn’t define who that is.”
Between ‘a patient and a physician’
Pohlgeers also zeroed in on the talking point often repeated by Amendment 4 supporters that abortion should be kept between “a patient and a physician.”
“But the physician’s not even in this amendment,” he said. “There’s nothing here. Everything’s just up in the air, in my opinion, with regards to where this can lead.”
The amendment is “extreme and it’s very misleading,” Pohlgeers said. “The narrative that is out there right now on television is just misrepresenting what current law offers.”
“And that’s dangerous,” he indicated.
He explained how the spreading of false narratives about Florida’s current pro-life law by pro-abortion activists has the potential to cause significant harm to women.
“We have women out there that think they may get arrested if they come in” to the emergency room for post-abortion bleeding and other complications, he pointed out.
Furthermore, Pohlgeers said that some women in Florida are encouraged by pro-abortion activists “to not tell ER doctors what happened.”
They falsely “think they’re going to be prosecuted,” he told CatholicVote. It’s “all written out here in Chapter 390: that will never happen to a woman who illegally obtains an abortion. They will never be prosecuted.”
“It’s just false,” he reiterated. “I don’t know what else to say other than that.”
Parental notification vs. consent
On top of this, Amendment 4 would “eliminate parental consent,” Pohlgeers said.
He noted that the Republican-controlled Florida Legislature wrote into Chapter 390 that parental “notification and consent” is required for a minor child to receive a legal abortion in Florida.
He stressed that if Amendment 4 is passed, it will nix this current requirement. Per its text, the amendment will retain Article X, Section 22 of the Florida Constitution – which requires parental notice, but not consent.
“That bothers me,” Pohlgeers stated. “That’s what really perked my ears when I first read the amendment.”
“And it’s because of what I do, obviously,” the doctor explained. “I treat kids.”
He stressed that the way the amendment’s proponents strive to eliminate parental consent for abortion runs counter to the basic tenets of pediatric medicine.
“I saw over 100,000 kids myself during my career just here in Jacksonville,” Pohlgeers said. “And every single one of them had parental consent.”
Notification without consent, he said, is essentially just telling a parent: “Your daughter is going to have an abortion, we’re getting ready to get started.”
“The bottom line,” he said, “is that the parent now will have no say. The parent won’t be able to stop it from happening.”
‘My work became my prayer’
“Early on in my career my faith was not really that important to me,” Pohlgeers shared. “It just seemed like I was spinning my wheels.”
He said in 1998, four years into his time at Wolfson, he had a conversation with a friend who is now a priest. “We were talking and he always says there is something that breaks through the ice. Some kind of life event usually.”
“And I had a couple of those happen,” he recounted. “So, I sort of had a reconversion.”
“I laugh with one of my priest friends and say I was a closet atheist,” Pohlgeers stated. “Because I would go to church on Sunday but it never really had an impact on my career and my life.”
“I compartmentalized a lot, my faith – didn’t really bring it into what I was doing every day,” he noted. “Which is kind of amazing now when I look back on it because when I started seeing patients after, I had this reconversion. It became more like a prayer.”
“My work became my prayer to God,” he said. “And I just gave that all up to Him.”
“And when that happened, the world just exploded for me,” the doctor said. “All these opportunities with leadership – hospital leadership and leadership within our private ER group – and then we were able to grow our practice.”
“And I really attribute all of that, all of that to God,” he stressed.
LifeNews Note: Anthony Iafrate writes for CatholicVote, where this column originally appeared.
