Massachusetts has joined nine other states plus Washington, D.C., without gestational limits on abortion, after Gov. Maura Healey shielded a new state law from an anti-abortion referendum petition that could have prevented it from taking effect.
Healey signed an emergency preamble Friday that put the law into effect immediately and protects it from suspension, preventing what she called “two more years of women being denied care.” Opponents can still pursue a repeal question on the November 2028 ballot.
Signed into law by Healey over the summer, “An Act prioritizing patient access to care” lifts the 24-week restriction. It eliminates the exceptions that previously governed abortions after that point, which applied when the procedure was needed to preserve the pregnant patient’s life or physical or mental health, or when physicians had diagnosed the fetus with a lethal anomaly.
Patients in Massachusetts may now seek abortion care at any stage of a pregnancy, based solely on the professional judgment of their physician and their own choice.
State Rep. Lindsay Sabadosa, D-Northampton, one of the act’s original co-sponsors, said lawmakers learned of denied patients largely because those patients came forward.
“We can’t go to a hospital and say, ‘How many people have you denied care to?’ That’s not how this works, that’s all very, very private. So really, this is the result of people speaking up and saying, ‘No one should ever have to go through what I went through,'” Sabadosa said.
Sabadosa said the exemptions framework pushed hospitals, seeking to avoid liability, to make conservative determinations as to whether a pregnancy met the legal criteria for an exemption. Now, the law provides that “no medical review process shall override the professional judgment of a treating physician and a patient or the patient’s health care proxy to provide an abortion.”
In a video statement posted to Facebook at the end of October, Bishop William Byrne of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Springfield called the law “radical” and thanked voters who signed the referendum petition. “The bishops of Massachusetts and I, we raised our voices in opposition to the bill and in favor of the beauty of life. Every child is a gift, and every person deserves a chance to live,” Byrne said.
The Compassionate Care Coalition says its “Repeal118” petition gathered 113,000 signatures from registered voters. The signatures must still be reviewed by the secretary of state’s office for a certified total, a process that takes one to two weeks, according to Debra O’Malley, spokesperson for Secretary of State William Galvin.
Healey’s intervention through an emergency preamble represents an “undemocratic rejection of the people’s will,” the anti-abortion coalition says on the Repeal118 website. “Such an emergency does not exist — only weakness on her part. Healey clearly demonstrates how beholden she really is to the Massachusetts abortion lobby.”
Writing in a Substack post Friday about families facing devastating diagnoses late in pregnancy, Healey, who is Catholic, said, “It is heartbreaking for any parent to make that decision. But when they do, they deserve compassionate, medically appropriate care close to home, from doctors they trust.”
One woman’s story
Thirty-three weeks into a deeply wanted pregnancy, Kate Dineen, a mother who grew up in West Springfield and now lives in Boston, said she learned her son had ventriculomegaly, a widening of the ventricles in his brain. A fetal MRI showed he’d suffered a stroke that could result in his death in utero or a spectrum of debilitating health complications in life.
While sitting in her kitchen in 2021, she was told over Zoom that, despite the severity of her son’s diagnosis, the hospital’s hands were tied. “I was told, ‘You may still be able to explore termination if you’re able to travel.’ And I just thought, ‘Travel where? I’m in Massachusetts being seen at one of the best hospitals in the country, if not the world,'” Dineen recalled in an interview.
After returning home from a clinic in Bethesda, Maryland, Dineen said she learned that the hospital where she’d been receiving prenatal care had assembled a panel to determine which treatment options aligned with state law. She responded by connecting with lawmakers to push for an expansion of the law beyond the “arbitrary and harmful” 24-week deadline.
“It’s a very difficult situation for patients who deserve the dignity to make decisions about their medical care without government interference,” she said. “That’s why this new law is so important: It reflects the fact that we trust women to make decisions about their own lives and their bodies and their families.”
Abortions late in pregnancy are exceedingly uncommon: In 2022, 1.1% of terminations were performed at or after 21 weeks of gestation, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Division of Reproductive Health.
But lawmakers say that in the two and a half months since the governor signed the expanded law, at least nine Massachusetts patients have been turned away and told to seek abortion care in another state.
“When you sit across from someone who had to travel out of state, you immediately feel a tremendous amount of compassion for them and try to figure out what is happening with our laws that has forced this person to suffer harm because our laws were not open enough to include what happened in their particular situation,” Sabadosa said. “And in talking to hospitals and patients and doctors, we really understood that the best course of action was to simply say, ‘We trust our medical providers, and we want doctors to be able to act in their best professional judgment.'”
