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AMERICANALMANAC (Ken Jacobs) - Massachusetts strips abortion limits, and a neonatologist warns life-and-death calls rest on flawed screenings Tue Aug 18 18:51:34 2026

Gov. Maura Healey signed a law making Massachusetts the tenth state to allow abortion up to birth, and a neonatologist says the prenatal tests used to justify late terminations are far less reliable than families are told. Dr. Robin Pierucci, a neonatologist and co-chair of the American College of Pediatricians' Pro-Life Council, told Fox News […] The post Massachusetts strips abortion limits, and a neonatologist warns life-and-death calls rest on flawed screenings appeared first on American Almanac .

Gov. Maura Healey signed a law making Massachusetts the tenth state to allow abortion up to birth, and a neonatologist says the prenatal tests used to justify late terminations are far less reliable than families are told. Dr. Robin Pierucci, a neonatologist and co-chair of the American College of Pediatricians' Pro-Life Council, told Fox News Digital that the new Massachusetts law raises grave medical and ethical questions, starting with the screening tools that drive many late-term abortion decisions. Prenatal imaging, she said, cannot reliably predict how severely a condition will affect a child after birth. Healey signed H. 5595, the Prioritizing Patient Access to Care Act, on Aug. 10, erasing the state's longstanding 24-week gestational limit and replacing it with a single, open-ended standard: a physician's professional judgment. The law takes effect in less than 90 days. Massachusetts now joins Alaska, Colorado, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington, D.C., in eliminating gestational-age restrictions on abortion entirely, the Washington Examiner reported . Pierucci says prenatal screenings cannot predict what they claim to predict Pierucci's central objection is not abstract. She works with premature infants at the edge of viability, babies born between 22 and 24 weeks' gestation. A baby at 24 weeks is just over halfway through a full-term pregnancy, roughly the size of a hand, with fingernails, eyelashes, and rapidly developing brain activity. Under the old Massachusetts law, that was the cutoff. Under the new one, there is no cutoff at all. The doctor's sharpest criticism targets the prenatal screening process itself. Imaging can detect the presence of a condition, she said, but it cannot measure severity. A diagnosis on a screen does not tell a parent whether a child will be mildly affected or profoundly disabled. "There's something called the spectrum of disease, meaning I can't tell usually from just a picture how much or how little the patient's going to be affected." Pierucci told Fox News Digital that families are making irreversible decisions based on incomplete information, and that the pattern is not rare. "This thing is going on frequently. It's very disturbing that we're making life and death decisions with so little information." She framed the issue as a failure of informed consent. If a screening result leads directly to a termination, and that result cannot predict the actual severity of a condition, the decision rests on a guess dressed up as a diagnosis. Pierucci argued that genuine healthcare would focus on supporting the child, not ending the pregnancy. "If it was really about healthcare, then it would be about protecting both the mom and the baby. And if we're really about healthcare, it would also be about if there's a problem that was identified, it will be about removing barriers for helping this baby live well." Bill H. 5595 passed both chambers and reached Healey's desk in weeks The legislation moved quickly through the Massachusetts statehouse. The House passed H. 5595 on July 22. The Senate followed on July 31. Healey signed it ten days later, Just The News reported . The bill's sponsor, State Rep. Lindsay Sabadosa, defended the change in familiar terms: "Medical decisions belong between patients and their doctors, not the Legislature." That framing treats the new law as a simple deregulation, removing politicians from the exam room. But what it actually does is remove every legal guardrail after 24 weeks and replace them with a single physician's judgment call, with no second opinion required and no list of qualifying conditions. The old law permitted post-24-week abortions only in cases of lethal fetal anomaly or risk to the mother's life or health. The new law eliminates even that narrow framework. AP News reported that supporters pointed to cases in which hospitals turned away women seeking late-term abortions, including one involving a fetus that had suffered a stroke and was unlikely to survive, as justification for broadening the standard. Opponents saw it differently. Myrna Maloney Flynn, president of Massachusetts Citizens for Life, said: "While this legislation prioritizes access, it does not prioritize a woman's safety." Kelsey Pritchard of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America called the bill "very extreme, legalizing abortion on demand until birth, paid for by taxpayers." Marjorie Dannenfelser, the group's president, noted that "without a minimum national standard, the United States remains 1 of only 8 countries worldwide that allows abortion at any point in pregnancy." Roughly 88,000 abortions a year already occur after the first trimester The Washington Examiner reported that approximately 8 percent of abortions in the United States, roughly 88,000 per year, occur in the second trimester or later. Massachusetts' new law does not change that national figure on its own, but it removes one more state-level barrier for procedures that most countries restrict or prohibit outright. Pierucci rejected the premise that a prenatal diagnosis justifies ending a pregnancy at any stage. She advocates perinatal palliative care, comfort-focused treatment for newborns with serious conditions, as an alternative that honors both the child and the family. "Even if we don't have the ability to fully heal something... I always have an obligation to care." She put the point more bluntly when discussing the ethics of acting on a suspected diagnosis alone. "Voting one off the island because there was a suspected diagnosis is just inconsistent to do no harm." An early termination, she added, does not spare a mother from grief. "It just meant her baby was dead sooner, which is heartbreaking to hear." Healey faces excommunication calls; her office invokes compassion The political and religious fallout has been swift. Breitbart reported that a LifeSite petition calling for Healey's excommunication from the Catholic Church gathered more than 25,000 signatures. CatholicVote President Kelsey Reinhardt sent a formal letter to the Catholic bishops of Massachusetts demanding ecclesiastical action. "When a Catholic governor signs legislation permitting abortion until birth, celebrates that signing publicly, and receives no response from her bishops beyond a press statement, the lesson absorbed by the faithful is not subtle." Healey's office responded by describing the governor as "a proud Catholic" who "believes everyone is deserving of kindness and empathy, especially in their time of need." In a separate statement, Healey herself said: "We believe that healthcare decisions should be made between women and families and their doctors, not politicians." Fox News Digital noted that Healey's office did not immediately respond to its own request for comment on Pierucci's specific criticisms about prenatal screening accuracy and conscientious objection. Pierucci warns of moral trauma for doctors forced to comply Beyond the screening question, Pierucci raised a concern that rarely surfaces in the political debate: what happens to medical professionals who object. The new law centers a single physician's judgment as the sole standard. Pierucci asked what protections exist for practitioners who believe the procedure violates their ethical obligations. "When we have laws that fail to meet an ethical standard, we risk moral trauma to those who have a conscientious objection to this. This is not consistent with their value system." The law's text, as described in available reporting, does not appear to address conscientious objection protections. That gap leaves open the question of whether hospitals or medical systems could pressure staff to participate in procedures they find morally untenable. Pierucci said her own position is not limited to late-term cases. "I don't give it different value at different points in gestation," she told Fox News Digital. Her objection is categorical, but the Massachusetts law makes the late-term question unavoidable, because it removes the one bright line the state had left. Nine states and D.C. already dropped gestational limits, Massachusetts is the latest Massachusetts' move follows a broader pattern among Democratic-led states that accelerated after the Supreme Court's 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade. With federal protections gone, blue states have moved to expand abortion access while red states have moved to restrict it. The result is a patchwork in which a procedure banned entirely in one state is available without gestational limit a few hours' drive away. The list of states with no gestational-age restrictions now includes Alaska, Colorado, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C. Each arrived at that position through different legislative paths, but the endpoint is the same: no statutory limit on when an abortion can be performed, so long as a physician approves. Supporters call it trust in doctors. Critics call it the absence of law. Pierucci calls it something else, a system that lets families make permanent decisions based on prenatal images that cannot deliver what they promise. When the law that is supposed to protect life has no limit, and the screening that is supposed to inform the decision cannot measure what matters, the only question left is who bears the consequences. It will not be the politicians who signed the bill or the advocates who cheered it. It will be the families who were never told how little a picture can show, and the children who never got the chance to prove the picture wrong. The post Massachusetts strips abortion limits, and a neonatologist warns life-and-death calls rest on flawed screenings appeared first on American Almanac .