Massachusetts Embraces Abortion Up to Birth: How New Law Is a Tragic Betrayal of the Most Vulnerable

Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey just signed H.5595 – the so-called “Prioritizing Patient Access to Care” Act – into law. With that signature, the Commonwealth erased the last meaningful statutory protections for viable preborn children and joined the small group of jurisdictions that permit abortion through all nine months of pregnancy based solely on a physician’s professional judgment.

Previously, Massachusetts law generally prohibited abortion after 24 weeks – the point at which a child can often survive outside the womb – with limited exceptions: to preserve the mother’s life, to preserve her physical or mental health, in cases of a lethal fetal anomaly, or where a grave fetal diagnosis indicated the child could not sustain life outside the uterus without extraordinary medical interventions.

Those standards are gone. The new law states simply that “an abortion may be performed by a physician based upon the professional judgment of the physician.” No medical review process may override that judgment.

Sign our petition: Stop the Abortion Industry’s War on Babies.

Critically, the legislation also eliminates the requirement that late-term abortions be performed in a hospital and removes Department of Public Health oversight of the policies and protocols governing these procedures. A late-term abortion may now legally occur in any setting a provider chooses, without the institutional safeguards a hospital setting was intended to provide.

Governor Healey presented the bill as necessary compassion for families facing devastating diagnoses and as a defense of the doctor-patient relationship. However, if the Governor were genuinely concerned with patient care, she would not be deregulating inherently dangerous late-term procedures, stripping away hospital requirements and public-health oversight, and authorizing the killing of viable children. “Patient access” in this context means expanding the circumstances under which one patient – the mother – can be subjected to a multi-day dismemberment procedure while the second patient – the child – is deliberately destroyed. That is not medicine. It is ideology that pushes abortion at all costs.

This is part of a disturbing trend in pro-abortion states: expanding abortion access not because women and families are better cared for, but because of purely ideological and politically driven agendas. The goal is not medical necessity or improved outcomes. It is the removal of every remaining limit on the intentional destruction of preborn human life.

Virginia is the next state to watch: Voters will face a constitutional amendment this November that would create a broad “right to reproductive freedom,” making it far more difficult to enact meaningful limits and potentially undoing existing protections. These measures are advanced not because they better protect women and families, but because they advance a political agenda. Citizens must pay close attention to what their elected officials are doing – especially the provisions moved quietly through legislative sessions – and they must vote accordingly. The lives of preborn children, and the integrity of the law itself, depend on it.

The ACLJ will continue to defend the inherent dignity of every human life and the principle that no child should be treated as disposable under the law.

Take action with us. Sign our petition: Stop the Abortion Industry’s War on Babies.