On August 10, Governor Maura Healey signed the Prioritizing Patient Access to Care Act, changing how Massachusetts governs abortion after 24 weeks.
Precision matters here, because both sides have been careless.
The old law already allowed abortion after 24 weeks in four situations: to preserve the patient’s life, to preserve her physical or mental health, for a fetal diagnosis that would result in death, and for a grave diagnosis incompatible with sustained life outside the womb. The new law removes that list and permits abortion after 24 weeks based on a physician’s professional judgment, consistent with accepted standards of care. It does not leave the decision to the pregnant woman alone.
Supporters say families receiving devastating late diagnoses were forced to travel out of state, away from their own doctors, while grieving. Massachusetts becomes roughly the tenth state, along with Washington, D.C., without a gestational limit. Such abortions are rare: 1.1% of U.S. abortions occurred after 21 weeks in 2022.
Rare does not mean small.
Christians confess that human life bears God’s image. “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27, ESV). David prayed, “For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb” (Psalm 139:13). God told Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you” (Jeremiah 1:5).
These verses do not resolve every medical dilemma. They establish something prior to policy: the unborn child is known by God, and therefore not morally invisible. When a state removes its remaining legal boundary around that life, faithful people should feel loss before they feel argument.
But grief must not curdle into contempt.
The women affected by later abortions are often carrying deeply wanted pregnancies that turned catastrophic. One advocate for this law lost her son in utero at 33 weeks and traveled to Maryland for care. Whatever we conclude about the law, we should refuse to speak of such people cruelly.
Jesus never used suffering people as material for an argument. “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” (Matthew 9:36). Conviction about the unborn should make the church gentler toward mothers, not harsher.
This is where our witness usually fails, and it is not a failure of political strategy. It is a failure of presence.
James is blunt: “If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, be warmed and filled,’ without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that?” (James 2:15–16).
Applied honestly, that verse asks whether our churches offer more than a position. Do we help with rent, groceries, transportation, childcare, medical bills, counseling, adoption, and the long unglamorous years afterward? Can a frightened woman tell the truth about her pregnancy in our congregation without becoming a subject of gossip? Do we call fathers to responsibility, or let them vanish?
Truth and mercy are not competing options. Jesus came “full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). Truth without grace becomes a weapon. Grace without truth becomes sentiment.
So grieve. Grieve for children whose protection has been narrowed to a clinical judgment. Grieve for women who feel they have no other option. Grieve for absent fathers and for churches that offered opinions instead of help.
Then act. “Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep” (Romans 12:15). “Open your mouth for the mute, for the rights of all who are destitute” (Proverbs 31:8). “Let us do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith” (Galatians 6:10).
Laws will keep changing. The church’s calling will not. We should already be present long before anyone reaches a clinic door.
~ Sunny
All Scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible, English Standard Version (ESV).