The bill moved fast. Filed at the start of the two-year legislative session by state Rep. Christine Barber, it sat largely dormant until late July, when it cleared the House Ways and Means Committee on July 22 and was pushed through both chambers within days under expedited procedures. Healey signed it roughly three weeks later, telling reporters she had heard "stories of anguish and heartache" from women facing complications late in pregnancy. The law takes effect in 90 days, placing its start around early November.
With her signature, Massachusetts becomes the eleventh state in the nation with no legal limit on how late in pregnancy an abortion may be performed, joining a small cluster of states, including Vermont, Colorado, and Oregon, that have adopted similarly unrestricted statutes since the fall of Roe v. Wade. The new law also expands the state's existing Shield Law, which already protected patients and providers from investigation by other states over abortion or gender-transition care performed legally in Massachusetts.
Pro-life advocates nationally had urged Healey to veto the bill in the weeks before it reached her desk, arguing that removing all limits erases any meaningful distinction between a medical procedure and the taking of a life that can, by the third trimester, survive outside the womb. Supporters of the law countered that it simply codifies decisions that should rest with a woman and her doctor, particularly in cases of severe fetal anomaly or maternal health crisis discovered late in pregnancy.
What a Law Cannot Undo
Set the politics aside for a moment, my friend, and look at what is actually being decided in Boston. A legislature can vote. A governor can sign. But no ink on paper changes what is growing inside a mother's womb in the twenty-fourth week, the thirtieth week, the thirty-ninth week. That child has a heartbeat, fingerprints, a face. The law can strip away every legal protection that child had, but it cannot strip away the truth of what he is.
This is the old lie dressed in new language — that a human life becomes valuable only when someone in power decides to recognize it. Pharaoh decided the Hebrew babies were expendable. Herod decided the children of Bethlehem were a threat to be managed. Every generation finds its own reasons, and every generation is wrong for the same reason: life is not granted by a statehouse. It is granted by God.
"Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations." (Jeremiah 1:5)
Notice what that verse says. Before Jeremiah had a birth certificate, before he had a mother who could feel him kick, God already knew him. Already had a purpose for him. That is not poetry. That is the plain claim of scripture about every child in every womb, in Massachusetts or anywhere else on this earth.
Now, some of you reading this have made a choice you regret. Maybe it was in a moment of fear, or pressure, or simple desperation, and you have carried the weight of it quietly for years. Hear this plainly: the same God who knit that child together is the God who sent His Son to die for sinners, and there is no sin His blood does not cover. Guilt is not the end of your story if you will bring it to the cross.
"Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow." (Isaiah 1:18)
A state can legislate away a legal restriction. It cannot legislate away conscience, and it cannot legislate away the cross. Those who grieve over this law are not wrong to grieve. But grief is not the last word for the believer. Repentance is real, forgiveness is real, and the God who numbers the hairs on your head is still, tonight, in the business of redeeming what looks unredeemable.