Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey signs late-term abortion bill into law

Twenty-four weeks used to be the line even a lot of pro-choice Democrats didn't want to erase. Now Massachusetts has erased it, and Maura Healey signed the pen down like it was a routine budget item. This isn't a tweak to some outdated statute nobody thought about. It's a deliberate decision to make the state's law one of the most permissive in the country, at a point in pregnancy most Americans, including plenty who call themselves pro-choice, have real discomfort with.

The framing coming out of the governor's office leans hard on stories of pain and anguish, and we don't doubt those stories are real. Nobody wants to pretend that late-term medical crises are simple. But that's exactly why the old law had exceptions built in for cases involving fatal fetal anomalies or serious risk to the mother. Lifting the restriction outright, rather than clarifying or expanding those exceptions, tells you the goal wasn't narrowly targeted compassion. It was removing a line altogether.

Massachusetts didn't need to do this to protect women facing genuine medical emergencies. It chose to go further, and it chose to do it now, while national attention on abortion policy is high and blue states are racing to position themselves as the furthest outpost from Dobbs. That's not really about the hard cases at all. It's about a state government deciding its residents, and increasingly people who might travel there, should have access to abortion with essentially no gestational limit worth naming.

Supporters will call this compassion. Fine. But compassion usually comes with some kind of boundary, some acknowledgment that a decision this consequential deserves scrutiny rather than a signature and a press release. Massachusetts just told us where it stands, plainly. The rest of the country should take note of what "one of the broadest in the country" actually means in practice.