Democrat Gov. Maura Healey of Massachusetts failed to answer The Federalist when asked whether she will sign H.B. 5595, a new abortion bill passed by both the state Senate and House last week. The Federalist questioned her on whether she intended to sign the bill that would make abortions legal through all nine months and received no response.
The law would remove the state’s current 24-week abortion ban and make abortion legal up to the very moment of birth. The current law allowing abortion until 24 weeks is already extreme: At 24 weeks, babies are already capable of hearing, tasting, and remembering stimuli; their facial features are almost fully formed, and they can survive outside the womb with medical help. Any woman for any reason will be able to get an abortion based on a doctor’s “professional judgment.”
According to Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, Massachusetts Democrats “fast tracked the measure to bypass the full committee process” to allow the Senate to pass the bill before the legislature adjourned.
If Healey signs the bill, Massachusetts would be the 11th state to allow abortion at any point in the United States, along with the District of Columbia. The U.S. is one of only eight countries in the world to allow for abortion at any point as of 2024, and “46 out of 50 European U.N. member countries restrict abortion on demand after 15 weeks of gestation,” according to the Charlotte Lozier Institute.
Healey has a vast pro-abortion track record, making it likely that she will pass H.B. 5595. Before becoming governor, Healey was elected as Massachusetts’ attorney general in 2014 with Planned Parenthood’s support. Planned Parenthood backed her again this year in her gubernatorial reelection campaign. While attorney general in 2022, Healey infamously issued an “anti-crisis-pregnancy-center advisory,” and hours after its release, pro-abortion advocates vandalized two pregnancy centers in Massachusetts.
As governor in 2023, Healey stockpiled 15,000 mifepristone chemical abortion doses to bypass the potential of court rulings restricting the drug. In 2024, she pushed for $2 million of taxpayer dollars to private abortion funds, and in 2025, Healey passed the Shield 2.0 Act with representatives of Planned Parenthood of Massachusetts and Mass General Brigham next to her. The Shield Act 2.0 bars the pursuit of justice when abortion pill providers traffic pills to women in states where mifepristone is banned. The act also “block[ed]courts here from considering or admitting cases of abuse, neglect or maltreatment for parents who support their children in receiving transgender care,” according to WBUR.
Massachusetts representatives created the bill after hearing about women paying for post-24-week abortions out of the state, the Boston Globe reported. Creating unlimited abortion access in the state is also one way to defy the Trump administration’s pro-life stance. “As the Trump Administration ramps up attacks on reproductive care and abortion access nationwide, Massachusetts must continue closing gaps in care so that women have full autonomy over the care they need, when and where they need it,” Sen. Robyn Kennedy, D-Mass., said.
Many Massachusetts doctors supported the bill, and health care groups sent a letter to the House speaker to urge increasing access to death-giving abortion procedures. Mass General Brigham, which runs a plethora of Massachusetts hospitals, Tufts Medicine, Beth Israel Lahey Health, UMass Memorial Health, and the Massachusetts Health & Hospital Association all signed the letter according to WBUR, Boston’s NPR news site.
The letter stated that the current 24-week ban is “arbitrary” and Massachusetts needs to “empower physicians to use their professional judgment and clinical expertise to make decisions in the best interest of their patients” by passing the bill. The medical institutions claimed that many women “receive new information about their pregnancies at or around 24 weeks,” justifying late-term abortions for parents who no longer desire their sick, disabled, or merely unwanted child.
SBA Pro-Life America President Marjorie Dannenfelser stated in a press release that only 10 percent of Americans support the “extreme laws” that allow abortion until birth. “The GOP must abandon the failed ‘leave it to the states’ position” that enabled the type of abortion bills Massachusetts has, she said, “and move the country toward a national protection for unborn children across this nation.”
