Massachusetts signed a new abortion law on Monday, and the press has settled into the usual choreography. Governor Maura Healey talks about protecting women. Critics get labeled extremists. Everybody agrees the details are too complicated for regular people to worry their heads about.
The details are not complicated. That is exactly why nobody wants to discuss them.
The law broadens the discretion physicians have to authorize abortions later in pregnancy and shields them from legal penalties for doing it. Dr. Christina Francis, a board certified OBGYN who runs the American Association of Pro-Life OBGYNs, points out the thing that follows from that. There is nothing in the statute that stops an abortion at 39 weeks and five days. Not a technicality. Not a hypothetical. Just the plain reading of what the legislature wrote and the governor signed.
Now here is the part that should end the argument, and it is medical rather than moral.
The entire public case for laws like this rests on the emergency. What if the mother's life is at risk? What if something goes catastrophically wrong at 30 weeks? You cannot let a woman die over a technicality.
Correct. Nobody should. So ask an actual obstetrician what happens in that emergency.
Francis says that when a woman past 24 weeks faces a life threatening complication, doctors deliver her, and that delivery is faster than a late abortion procedure. She can perform an emergency C-section in under five minutes. A late term abortion is not a five minute procedure. It runs across multiple days.
Sit with that. In the scenario everyone uses to justify these laws, the abortion is the slower option. If the emergency is real, if minutes matter, if the mother is crashing, no competent physician schedules a multi-day procedure. He delivers the baby and treats the mother. That has been the standard of care for a long time, and it does not require a single line of what Massachusetts just passed.
Which raises the obvious question. If the emergency case is already handled by delivery, what is the new law actually for?
Abby Johnson, who ran a Planned Parenthood clinic before switching sides, says the claim that these abortions only happen in dire medical circumstances does not match what she saw from the inside. She thinks laws like this one are less about medicine than about reaction, blue states swinging hard because red states have moved the other direction. Massachusetts is not solving a clinical problem. It is making a statement, and it is making it with other people's children.
Healey's defense is the one hard case, and it deserves to be named honestly. She talks about families who wanted a baby, who got a devastating diagnosis late, and who had to drive hundreds of miles while grieving. Those families exist. Their situation is genuinely awful.
But a law written for the hardest case that puts no ceiling anywhere is not a law about that case. It is a law about everything, and everyone drafting it knew that when they left the ceiling out.
Nine other states have gone here. Massachusetts is the tenth.
Ask your representative a simple question and watch what happens. Not whether they support abortion rights. Ask whether they can name any week of pregnancy at which they would say no.
Most of them cannot. That is the whole story.
