Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey has signed a law explicitly legalizing abortion throughout pregnancy, that is, to the moment of birth. State law had already allowed it in several circumstances, the most capacious being whenever a physician considered it necessary to preserve a patient’s mental health. The new law gets rid of this essentially meaningless language about circumstances. It now says that “an abortion may be performed by a physician based upon the professional judgment of the physician.”
Whenever the subject of abortions late in pregnancy comes up, supporters of it fall back on the same fictions. It’s supposedly rare and happens only when the pregnancy poses severe physical risks to the mother or the baby has severe abnormalities incompatible with life.
In truth, as I’ve written many times before — most recently here:
- There are far more unborn children killed late in pregnancy than there are, say, kids killed by gun homicide.
- The evidence we have, some of it collected by researchers who favor legal abortion, indicates that most abortions after the 20th week are elective, not based on risks to the mother’s physical health or on severe abnormalities.
- It is hard even to imagine circumstances in which killing a child in the late stages of pregnancy, rather than delivering the child early, would be needed to save a mother from death or physical harm.
- The defenders oppose any effort to limit abortions even late in pregnancy to the circumstances they invoke to defend them — as the new Massachusetts law illustrates.
What, after all, was the problem the new law was enacted to address? Were too many abortions late in pregnancy going undone because of the notional limits still on the books? Or was it just too important to proclaim the principle that unborn children, no matter their stage of development, should be legally subject to lethal violence?