Governor Maura Healey signed an anyplace-anytime abortion policy into law, prompting celebration in the statehouse.
Abortion at any time, for any reason, is now the law in Massachusetts. Governor Maura Healey, surrounded by women, made it so at a signing ceremony with fanfare yesterday.
As long as I’m Governor, abortion will remain safe, legal and accessible in Massachusetts.
You have my word. pic.twitter.com/0PKw1ufQF5
— Governor Maura Healey (@MassGovernor) August 10, 2026
The Bay State is one of ten states post-Dobbs with an anytime-anyplace abortion law. And later-term surgical abortions don’t have to be in hospitals.
Massachusetts is now technically even more extreme than New York. Previously in Massachusetts, you needed a health reason (including mental) for an abortion. That’s the current law in the Empire State.
Honestly, though, one wonders how much this is a political play to cement a narrative, considering that in New York doctors are sending abortion pills to Louisiana and Texas. Even before Roe v. Wade was overturned, Governor Kathy Hochul was encouraging women outside the state to travel to New York to let Lady Liberty embrace them with abortions.
Forgive my skepticism — cynicism, perhaps — but I find it hard to believe that there are not doctors in both states who would find reasons to justify abortions in most circumstances after 24 weeks in a pregnancy.
There are still pro-lifers left in Massachusetts. If their message would be heard above the din of the abortion celebration, it might give the Maura Healeys of the world and those who sign on to the pro-choice cause something to answer for. In a statement, Massachusetts Citizens for Life president Myrna Maloney Flynn said:
Legalizing elective abortion up to birth on healthy mothers and healthy, pain-capable unborn children is not about protecting the doctor-patient relationship. 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.
The U.S. was an outlier during the years of Roe, and now we are state by state — with some of the most obnoxious blue states trying to moot the choices of the red by mailing abortion pills (and the Trump administration doing nothing to stop it).
Follow the science, and realize we eliminate the lives of the inconvenient, plain and simple.
Exceptions make bad law, but nowadays they are sometimes cynically produced to make a cultural point. (Consider when Philadelphia shut down Catholic foster-care services over a complaint of discrimination that no actual same-sex couple had made. And yet Catholic Social Services had to go all the way to the Supreme Court.)
The only way out of this manipulative cruelty — and barbarism in some of these late-term scenarios — is for us to offer support to women in need, so that there are no unwanted pregnancies and no babies whose humanity is denied.