Since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215 (2022), there has been much discussion about “codifying Roe” in state law.
But the Prioritizing Patient Access to Care Act, signed by Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey on Aug. 12, goes far beyond what the Supreme Court actually decided in 1973.
Technically and on paper, Roe did not establish an unlimited right to abortion throughout pregnancy. Quite the opposite.
The Court expressly rejected the argument that a woman’s right was absolute.
It saw abortion as a medical decision, with the physician playing a central role.
It held that, after viability, a state could regulate — and even prohibit — abortion when necessary to protect potential human life, subject to an exception for the life or health of the mother.
The Court also emphasized that the state’s interest in protecting potential life becomes compelling as pregnancy progresses.
Now we know that health exception was the exception that swallowed the rule. Nonetheless, Roe said what it said.
What Massachusetts law says has now moved in the opposite direction.
The new law eliminates the previous restrictions on abortion after 24 weeks.
It removes the requirement that such an abortion be justified by specified circumstances — including preserving the patient’s life or health, a lethal fetal anomaly, or a grave fetal diagnosis — and replaces those provisions with a standard under which an abortion may be performed based on the physician’s “professional judgment.”
It also provides that a medical review process may not override that judgment.
Notice the shift: from “medical judgment” to “professional judgment.”
Massachusetts has joined several other states in adopting one of the nation’s most permissive abortion regimes, with no statutory gestational limit.
That is not a mere restoration of Roe. It is a policy choice that goes substantially beyond the constitutional framework Roe itself established.
And that choice deserves serious public scrutiny.
The question is particularly important because Americans have consistently distinguished between abortion early in pregnancy and abortion late in pregnancy.
Gallup’s 2023 polling found that 70% of Americans said abortion should generally be illegal during the last three months of pregnancy, compared with 22% who said it should be legal.
Pew Research Center found a similar divide. At 24 weeks, 43% of Americans said abortion should be illegal, compared with 22% who said it should be legal and 18% who said it depends.
Democrats themselves were divided: 34% said abortion should be legal at 24 weeks, 29 percent said it should be illegal, and 21% said it depends.
Those numbers make an important point: The American public does not hold an absolutist view of abortion rights.
Most Americans who support legal abortion draw a line as pregnancy advances.
Those of us who oppose abortion should take a strategic lesson from all of this.
Every abortion kills an equally valuable human life, and every life should be protected equally.
But a moral principle is not the same as a pedagogical one.
To educate the American people about abortion and to build a culture of life, we should move from what is most obvious to what is less obvious.
We should start where people already agree and build on that.
We already have a consensus about late-term abortion.
So let’s not allow the abortion lobby and the Democrats to get away with passing laws like they just did in Massachusetts, or imposing unlimited abortion on state constitutions like they want to do this Fall in Virginia, Idaho and Nevada, while at the same time dodging the grave moral concerns most Americans have.
When more laws and constitutional amendments allow the killing of a child who is healthy, can feel pain, can survive outside the womb, and is being carried by a healthy mother, we are moving in the wrong direction.
As part of an overall late-term abortion educational effort, Priests for Life will continue to bring attention to laws such as Massachusetts’ new law, document the abortion practices they permit, and amplify the testimonies of women who have experienced late abortions.
The goal is not merely to win a political argument.
It is to awaken the public conscience to the human stakes of permitting more and more late-term abortion – an idea even Roe v. Wade said went too far.
Frank Pavone is an anti-abortion leader and national director of Priests for Life.
