EDITORIAL: The glee with which the group of women celebrated infanticide with Gov. Maura Healey signing the Bay State’s new abortion legislation provoked a visceral reaction among people of goodwill.
Before this summer, nine states and the District of Columbia, in a rage over the demise of Roe v. Wade, and seemingly vying to win a prize for adopting the most extreme pro-abortion policies on Earth, legalized the killing of babies in the womb at any stage of pregnancy, up to the moment of birth.
Together, Alaska, Colorado, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont and Washington, D.C., make up a sizable chunk of the country, accounting for more than 13% of the U.S. population.
Yet for some reason, none of those horrific laws elicited anywhere near the shock and outrage that Massachusetts triggered when it joined the abortion-until-birth club on Aug. 10. It’s worth reflecting on why that might be the case.
Massachusetts previously restricted abortion after 24 weeks, on par with the most permissive abortion laws in Europe, but it allowed later-term abortions in cases involving a lethal fetal anomaly or diagnosis, or a physician’s judgment that the unborn child wouldn’t likely survive outside the uterus or that a woman’s life or physical or mental health was at risk.
The state’s new law sweeps away those requirements. It simply leaves the decision up to the “professional judgment” of a physician. Not only that, but the act prohibits medical review boards from interfering. That raises the question: If “abortion is health care,” as the law’s supporters insist, why shouldn’t it be subject to the same professional oversight that applies to every other medical procedure?
But it’s not the law’s fine print that explains why so many Catholics and other Americans who recognize the sanctity of human life have reacted so strongly to it.
Part of the reason is that Gov. Maura Healey, who signed the act into law, professes to be a “proud Catholic.” This is a scandal, obviously, which is why the political action group CatholicVote, among others, has called for the governor’s excommunication.
But for those who follow Massachusetts politics, it’s hardly shocking. Healey, a progressive Democrat and the first openly lesbian U.S. governor, is an ardent advocate of abortion “rights.” In 2023, in response to legal challenges to the federal regulation of the abortion drug mifepristone, she ordered the University of Massachusetts to stockpile 15,000 abortion pills, in case of a federal ban.
So, if none of this came as a surprise, why has the law struck such a raw nerve?
We believe the explanation lies in the visceral reaction many people had to the video clip of a room full of women smiling and applauding when Healey signed the act into law.
One of those women was late-term abortion activist Kate Dineen, who said she paid $10,000 to abort her unborn son in Maryland after she was denied an abortion in Massachusetts 33 weeks into her pregnancy. The reason, she says, is that doctors didn’t believe the “catastrophic stroke” the child suffered in utero met the state’s late-term abortion criteria. That strongly suggests that the baby’s medical condition wasn’t lethal.
Dineen and the other gleeful women gathered around Healey were there to try to normalize a barbaric law that, until recently, few Americans — let alone politicians — would have supported. As it stands, the U.S. is one of only eight countries that allows abortion without any gestational limits, according to the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute. (The others are Australia, Canada, China, Guinea-Bissau, Mexico, South Korea and Vietnam.)
Yet those on the side of life who watched the celebration in Boston saw something else: a disturbing inversion of a woman’s natural role as a protector and nurturer of children, and a conscience-shocking moment of maleficence. May God have mercy on us.
