Governor Maura Healey stood before a room of applauding supporters this week and signed away any remaining protection for unborn children in Massachusetts. The state just became the tenth in America where abortion is legal right up until birth. Let that sink in for a moment.
The Prioritizing Patient Access to Care Act sounds innocuous enough, doesn’t it? That’s how these things work. Wrap something unthinkable in therapeutic language and suddenly it becomes policy. What this law actually does is remove the previous 24-week gestational limit and grant healthcare workers complete discretion to perform abortions at any point in pregnancy without legal consequences. Any point. Nine months. Full term. A baby who could survive outside the womb.
Healey framed this as compassion, naturally. She talked about families facing medical complications, fatal diagnoses, maternal health crises. And yes, those situations exist and they’re heartbreaking. But here’s what nobody wants to say out loud: we already had exceptions for those cases. The previous law included them. What changed isn’t access to care in genuine medical emergencies. What changed is that now there are essentially no rules at all.
The governor said healthcare decisions should be made between women, families, and doctors, not politicians. It’s a compelling line. Who wants politicians in the exam room? But this argument ignores something fundamental. We have laws about medical practice precisely because not every decision made in private is ethical or right. We don’t let doctors prescribe whatever they want without oversight. We don’t allow medical professionals to operate without standards and accountability. Why should ending a human life be the one area where we pretend professional judgment alone is sufficient?
Massachusetts now joins Alaska, Colorado, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, and Vermont in this category, along with Washington D.C. That’s ten states plus the capital where the law places no restriction on when an abortion can occur. These aren’t backwater jurisdictions. These are places that pride themselves on being progressive, enlightened, ahead of the curve.
You know what strikes me most about Healey’s comments? The audacity of claiming that anyone who opposes this bill doesn’t care about women’s health. That’s not argument. That’s accusation masquerading as policy discussion. Plenty of people, including plenty of women, believe that a baby at eight or nine months deserves legal protection. Believing that doesn’t make you anti-woman. It makes you pro-life in the most literal sense possible.
The bill takes effect in 90 days. Healey promised that abortion will remain safe, legal, and accessible in Massachusetts for as long as she’s governor. She positioned the legislation as a shield against efforts by President Trump and Republicans to roll back abortion protections nationwide. There’s the real game. This isn’t about medical emergencies or rare tragic cases. This is about drawing the brightest possible line between blue states and red states, between progressive values and conservative ones.
Individual liberty matters. Limited government matters. But conservatism has never meant the absence of all moral boundaries. A society that can’t agree that a full-term baby deserves protection has lost something essential. We can debate where life begins. We can disagree about first trimester policy. But by the third trimester, we’re not talking about a clump of cells. We’re talking about a human being who can feel pain, who could survive with medical care, who has fingerprints and a beating heart.
The applause and smiles at that signing ceremony tell you everything you need to know about how far we’ve drifted. What used to be described as rare, safe, and legal has become celebrated and unrestricted. The question isn’t whether you’re pro-choice or pro-life anymore. The question is whether there’s any limit you’d accept, any point at which you’d say enough.
Massachusetts just answered that question. The answer, apparently, is no.
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