This Monday in a crowded room of people beaming with pride and excitement, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey smiled for the cameras as she enthusiastically signed legislation legalizing abortion for any reason, at any time, right up to the moment of birth.
It’s hard to overstate just how jarring and bizarre this is. A room full of people is happily cheering about a newfound “right” to end the lives of fully developed, viable preborn children for whatever reason they please. You expect to see handshakes and pats on the back at a bill-signing ceremony for a new community outreach program or tax cuts. But abortion on demand?
What happened in Massachusetts is a tragedy wrapped up in the trimmings and trappings of a celebration.
Massachusetts joins nine other states (Alaska, Colorado, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, and Vermont) that allow abortion through all nine months of pregnancy. And to be clear, Massachusetts already had an extreme abortion policy. The previous 24-week cutoff had exceptions so vague that they were exceptions in name only. Monday’s signing ceremony was the result of the abortion industry’s years of work to ensure that unborn children have no protections whatsoever, even seconds before birth.
Euphemisms about “access” and “women’s health” are sad attempts to hide the reality of late-term abortions. Here are the facts that Healey and the abortion industry don’t want you to know.
Every state, including pro-life ones, already allows doctors to step in to save lives. Doctors treat ectopic pregnancies and manage miscarriages all the time. When a woman’s life is in danger, delivery before viability isn’t even considered an abortion. That’s because in these cases, the goal is not to directly and deliberately end an unborn child’s life.
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Imagine two rooms at a hospital: In one, a doctor induces delivery because a pregnant woman has sepsis and her life is in immediate danger. The baby girl is born alive and receives medical care. Perhaps she’s only 18 weeks old and won’t live long, so she receives comfort care while her parents rock her in their arms.
In the other room, there’s a child diagnosed with a serious heart condition, and the parents aren’t interested in treatment. An abortionist tears the 26-week-old baby boy apart limb from limb in a dilation and evacuation abortion. Or maybe the abortionist injects him with a drug to cause cardiac arrest and then delivers him dead (intact or in pieces).
The doctor in the first room treated the unborn child as the patient she is. The abortionist in the second room didn’t consider the baby boy with a treatable heart condition a patient at all.
Doctors can—and do—save mothers’ lives without turning to induced abortion. All pregnancies come to an end, some sooner than others. Pro-life doctors routinely navigate how to end pregnancy ethically. Elective, induced abortion is not part of the equation. And if a woman is truly suffering from a life-threatening emergency, there’s no time for a multi-day late-term abortion procedure. Delivery or cesarean section is the quickest, safest way to separate mother and baby. Then, both patients can receive care.
Late-term abortions are often elective, and even the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute has admitted it. Most women “seeking later terminations are not doing so for reasons of fetal anomaly or life endangerment.” The Atlantic magazine profiled an abortionist in Colorado who “specializes” in late-term abortion. He performs sex-selection abortions and said at least half of his abortions are on perfectly healthy babies.
Late-term abortions are tragically more common than people realize. In the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s most recent 2022 abortion data report, nearly 5,000 babies were aborted at or after 21 weeks’ gestation. At that stage, if given proper medical care, many premature babies can survive. The real number is higher, though, because some radically pro-abortion states, such as California and Maryland, don’t submit any abortion data.
There is also good news that abortion advocates prefer to ignore. Innovations in perinatal hospice, palliative care, and treatment options offer parents and babies something better than abortion. Even when a child is not expected to survive long, we can support parents in their grief. We can give babies the dignity of a loving embrace before they pass from this life. We can pursue cutting-edge treatment options that weren’t possible even a few years ago.
The truth is that abortion is a violent act against an innocent person. That’s the case whether the person happens to be the size of a tadpole, is due to be born tomorrow, or was born two days ago. Our humanity doesn’t depend on our location, stage of development, medical prognosis, or perceived burden to others.
The high-fives and photo ops don’t hide the fact that what happened in Massachusetts is a tragedy, not a triumph. Maybe one day, Healey and her cheering companions will realize that in a race to the bottom, nobody wins.
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