Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey Signs Bill for Abortions Up to Birth

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Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey has signed H.5595, which would legalize abortions up to birth.

The radical bill that allows abortions up until birth even on healthy unborn babies. Democrats fast tracked the measure to bypass the full committee process so the full body could pass the bill before the legislature adjourned.

The bill passed the overwhelmingly Democrat House on July 22 by a vote of 119-33. Under current state law, abortions are allowed up to 24 weeks of pregnancy, although weak exceptions essentially allow it up to birth.

Abortions after that point are permitted only when the mother’s life or health is threatened (which could mean anything), or if the baby is unlikely to survive outside the womb. The new bill shifts the criteria for late-term abortions from that list of specific medical conditions to a more flexible standard based solely on the abortionist approving the abortion.

It would allow abortions to be carried out on babies at any gestational age after 24 weeks for any reason.

“Governor Healey and the Massachusetts Legislature have erased the final protections for unborn children who can feel pain and who could survive outside the womb,” said Carol Tobias, president of National Right to Life. “At the very stage when premature babies are receiving lifesaving care in neonatal intensive care units, Massachusetts will permit abortionists to end the lives of children of the same age—and even older. That is not compassion, and it is not health care.”

Supporters claim the law protects the doctor-patient relationship, but it places the decision entirely in the hands of the abortionist while denying any legal protection to the unborn child.

“Legalizing elective abortion up to birth on healthy mothers and healthy, pain-capable unborn children is not about protecting the doctor-patient relationship,” said Myrna Maloney Flynn, president of Massachusetts Citizens for Life, National Right to Life’s state affiliate. “It is about abortionists normalizing the deaths of fully developed infants and pressuring vulnerable women to permit their unborn children to die in heinous acts of violence. These abortions represent among the most severe human rights abuses permitted in only a few places around the world, including China and North Korea.”

“This law exposes the dishonesty behind the claim that no one supports abortion until birth,” Tobias continued. “When lawmakers remove every objective limitation and authorize an abortion provider to decide whether an abortion may be performed at any point in pregnancy, abortion until birth is precisely what the law allows.”

Previously, Massachusetts law permitted abortions after 24 weeks only when necessary to preserve the life or physical or mental health of the mother, or in cases involving a lethal or severe fetal diagnosis. The new law replaces those statutory conditions with the “professional judgment” of the physician performing the abortion—effectively allowing abortion for any reason throughout pregnancy, including when both mother and unborn child are healthy.

The legislation also eliminates the requirement that abortions after 24 weeks be performed in a hospital, removing an important safeguard for women undergoing dangerous late-term procedures.

Second- and third-trimester abortions are generally done by dismemberment or labor induction. The latter may result in a live birth if the abortionist has not first delivered a lethal injection into the baby’s heart (“fetal demise”), which many admit they do not. According to the Charlotte Lozier Institute, over 60,000 abortions occur after 15 weeks each year – a point by which science shows the baby feels pain.

Pro-life advocates warn this effectively removes all remaining limits and permits the killing of viable unborn children right up to the point of birth.

“This bill basically allows abortion at any time of the pregnancy and for any reason, so it is absolutely egregious,” said Michael King, president of the Massachusetts Family Institute. He noted that the measure would also “take this whole process of abortion outside of the hospital. So a doctor could do this perhaps anywhere they think is viable to do this kind of procedure and take out the safeguards of a hospital.”

Massachusetts Citizens for Life President Myrna Maloney Flynn said the bill does nothing to help women facing genuine complications.

“Women experiencing unimaginable, heart wrenching pregnancy complications absolutely deserve all the support they need, but that support is not what this bill provides,” Flynn remarked. “Instead, this bill ensures increased abortion industry profits and taxpayer-funded late-term procedures.”

“We encourage those celebrating Governor Healey’s politically-motivated signature to learn not only about late-term and ‘dismemberment’ abortions, many of which Massachusetts taxpayers will fund, but also about perinatal hospice, palliative care options and other resources available to women faced with devastating, but never hopeless, fetal diagnoses,” Flynn said.

“Legalizing elective abortion up to birth on healthy moms and healthy, pain-capable infants is not about a doctor-patient relationship but rather abortionists normalizing infant death and pressuring vulnerable women to permit their unborn children to die in heinous acts of violence, which are among the most severe human rights assaults allowed in only a few places, among them China and North Korea,” Flynn continued.

She highlighted that the legislation allows a single doctor “to subjectively decide that any unborn infant can be killed in or outside of a hospital.”

Medical experts reject the idea that abortion is ever required to save a mother’s life.

“It is never medically necessary to purposely end the life of a preborn child in order to save her mother,” said Christina Francis, a board-certified OB-GYN and CEO of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists. In true emergencies, she explained, a physician must separate the mother from the baby when necessary, but that is not an abortion: “AAPLOG recommends referring to these interventions as ‘maternal-fetal separations’ given the clear difference of intent between those lifesaving treatments and induced abortion.”

Massachusetts becomes the 11th state plus the District of Columbia with no limits on abortion.