The Massachusetts House passed the bill 119-33 on July 22, with every Republican member present voting against it. The state Senate concurred and sent the measure to the governor's desk on July 31. At the signing, Healey said the change would let families facing "anguish and heartache" over late-pregnancy medical complications get care in their home state rather than traveling elsewhere. Massachusetts now joins Alaska, Colorado, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington, D.C., as jurisdictions with no statutory limit on how late in pregnancy an abortion may be performed.
Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of SBA Pro-Life America, called the law's consequences a matter that "should shock the conscience," saying it will add to the tens of thousands of unborn children lost to abortion each year. Kelsey Pritchard, the organization's communications director, described the measure as "very extreme, legalizing abortion on demand until birth, paid for by taxpayers." Supporters countered that the law addresses a narrow set of medical emergencies and simply removes red tape between a patient and her doctor.
Whose Judgment Is It, Really?
Sit with that phrase a moment, friend — "professional judgment." Two words doing an enormous amount of work. A law that once drew a line at the mother's life now draws no line at all, and hands the whole decision to one person in a room. That is not a small change in wording. That is the difference between a boundary and no boundary whatsoever.
Now, a preacher who has sat with grieving families knows the hard cases are real. A woman who learns at seven months that something has gone terribly wrong is not a statistic — she is a soul carrying sorrow no law can fully answer. Nobody ought to mock that grief. But hard cases have a way of writing bad law, because once the exception swallows the rule, the child at eight months stops being a special circumstance. He becomes, simply, a decision somebody else gets to make for him.
Scripture never speaks of the child in the womb as a maybe, a possibility, a question mark awaiting a professional's judgment. It speaks of a person, known and formed on purpose before any physician ever drew a breath to rule on him.
"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)
That word came to Jeremiah, but the principle did not stop with one prophet. The Psalmist said much the same of himself, in words any mother could pray over her own child: "For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mother's womb" (Psalm 139:13). If the Lord is knitting a soul together in secret, then no statehouse — however sincere its intentions — has the authority to define that soul out of existence by moving the goalposts of who counts.
Here is the good news underneath the hard news, and it is good news for every party in this story. The God who formed that child also meets the mother in her anguish, and He turns away from neither one. He does not force you to choose between mercy for the mother and life for the child — He is the only physician who has ever held both without dropping either. That is what Calvary was for: a fallen world full of hard cases and impossible-seeming choices, and a Savior who bore the judgment Himself so that ordinary people caught in extraordinary sorrow could find grace, and not merely a law that counts and cuts.
Massachusetts has made its choice on paper this week. But paper does not get the last word on a human life. The child in the womb was never a mere legal category to begin with — he was a person, known before he was formed, and he remains one no matter what any statute says today.