‘Barbaric’ abortion provision fuels Christian push to crack down on Dem governor

Massachusetts already had one of the more permissive abortion laws in the country. Healey's signature stretches it further, removing the guardrails that used to require a specific medical justification for late-term procedures. Call it what it is: a law that allows abortion up to the moment of birth, with no meaningful check on the reasoning behind it. That's not a fringe description invented by activists. It's what the statute now permits.

CatholicVote's call for the bishops to weigh excommunication is going to strike plenty of people as extreme, and maybe it is a step too far as a matter of church discipline. But the reaction itself makes sense once you sit with what actually happened here. A Catholic governor put her signature on a policy that her own church considers a grave moral wrong, at the furthest possible extreme of the debate. Asking whether that carries any consequence within her faith isn't fanaticism. It's a serious question about what it means to claim a religious identity while governing in direct defiance of it.

The easy move is to frame this as religious zealots trying to punish a politician for doing her job. But nobody forced Healey to identify as Catholic while pushing legislation that goes further than most Americans, including plenty of pro-choice Americans, are comfortable with. Polling has shown for years that support for abortion access drops off sharply in the third trimester. This law doesn't just track public opinion. It runs past it.

Whatever you think of excommunication as a remedy, the underlying discomfort is real and it isn't going away. When a law removes the last remaining limits on late-term abortion, the pushback isn't going to come only from bishops. It's going to come from a lot of ordinary people who thought there was still a line somewhere, and just watched it disappear.