The old statute permitted abortion after 24 weeks only in narrow circumstances: to save the mother's life, to protect her physical or mental health, or when a lethal fetal anomaly meant the child could not survive outside the womb. The new law strikes those categories altogether. It leaves the decision to what the bill calls "the professional judgment of the physician," with no gestational limit written anywhere in the statute.
Healey said the change keeps such decisions "between women and families and their doctors, not politicians," and pledged, "Abortion will remain safe. It will remain legal, and it will remain accessible here in Massachusetts. That's my commitment to you." With her signature, Massachusetts becomes the eleventh state, alongside the District of Columbia, to remove all gestational limits on abortion, joining Alaska, Colorado, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon and Vermont.
A Line No Legislature Can Move
A statehouse can strike a number from a code book. Fifteen senators can raise their hands and a governor can sign her name, and a line on a calendar disappears from Massachusetts law. But no vote count ever moved the truth of when a life begins, and no signature changes what that child already is, growing quietly and completely unaware, in the ninth month of the womb.
Every soul in Massachusetts, and Michiana, and everywhere else on this earth, was known before anyone in a statehouse ever counted votes on the matter. The prophet Jeremiah did not learn who he was in a delivery room. God had already settled it.
"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 is not sentiment. That is the plain claim of scripture: the hand that formed a child in secret was at work long before any doctor's judgment was needed, long before any hospital had a chart. The psalmist said much the same thing, that God "hast covered me in my mother's womb" (Psalm 139:13). A law can call that covered child a matter of professional discretion. It cannot make it so.
My friend, if you carry the weight of a decision like this one, made in fear or in a hard hour, hear this plainly: the God who formed that child in secret is also the God who forgives in the open. He does not deal with you as your sin deserves. He deals with you through His Son, who bore what could not be undone, so that no one need carry it alone.
Governor Healey spoke of accessibility and of keeping politicians out of the exam room. Those are the words of someone who believes she is protecting women. The kinder answer, and the truer one, is that a nation does not protect its women by widening the door to the ending of its children. It protects them by surrounding both mother and child with such care that neither is ever made to feel the other is the obstacle.
Eleven states now stand where Massachusetts stands. That number will not shrink because a newspaper says it should. It will shrink, if it shrinds at all, because ordinary people start believing again what Jeremiah believed: that the child not yet born is already known, already named, already loved by the One who formed him.
That belief has never needed a statehouse to make it true. It only needs people willing to say so, plainly, and to live as though the womb is holy ground.