What my son's ultrasound taught me about abortion — and Massachusetts ignores
My son turned 1 year old last month, but I still have his ultrasound pictures up on the fridge. They were the first time I got to see his little hands, his feet, and even his eyes open wide and looking, somehow, right at me. He was 20 weeks along in that picture. Already kicking. Already reaching. Already becoming the boy who now pulls himself up on that same refrigerator door.
I thought of him — of those pictures curling on my fridge — as I watched Massachusetts Democrat Gov. Maura Healey sign a law this week that strips protections from every baby at the same stage of pregnancy against late-term abortion.
The state’s new law, the Prioritizing Patient Access to Care Act, guts existing legislation that restricted abortions at 24 weeks and later to cases involving the mother’s life, physical or mental health, or severe fetal diagnoses, and replaces those specific statutory conditions with a sweeping new standard stating that "an abortion may be performed by a physician based upon the professional judgment of the physician." No gestational limit. No requirement that any particular maternal or fetal condition be present.
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Surrounded by cheering supporters at the signing, Healey insisted the new law is meant to protect women. Protect them from what, exactly? Massachusetts women facing the truly horrific scenarios — pregnancies that turned fatal for mother or child — already had access to abortion under the state’s prior law. This bill doesn’t hand them a single protection they didn’t already have.
What it does do is remove the specific guardrails that governed abortions at such a late stage — namely, the requirement that a physician determine that the abortion was necessary to protect the mother’s life, physical or mental health, or was warranted because of a lethal or extraordinarily grave fetal diagnosis.
Under the new law, none of those circumstances have to be established in the statute. The legal standard is simply the physician’s professional judgment.
It’s worth pausing on what’s actually happening inside the womb at 24 weeks. Just like my son in his ultrasound pictures, babies at 24 weeks have a fully formed face, fingerprints, and a heartbeat that’s been audible for months. Their lungs are still maturing, but their inner ears are developed enough to hear voices, and they respond to sound and touch.
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This is also around the point in pregnancy known as viability — the gestational age at which, with intensive NICU care, a baby born prematurely has a real chance of survival outside the womb. My sister-in-law is a NICU nurse and has cared for several of these infants, some as young as 22 and 23 weeks old. She has watched their mothers sit through countless sleepless nights, praying for tiny lungs to grow strong enough and hearts to keep beating. It is a testament to modern medicine how often those prayers are answered.
So what, exactly, separates the baby fighting for his life in the NICU from the baby electively aborted at the very same stage — other than whether someone wanted him?
The truth at the center of the abortion debate — the one its advocates rarely reckon with — is that a person’s life has worth in and of itself, independent of anyone else’s readiness to receive it. My son had worth and meaning before I was ready for him, before I’d fully wrapped my mind around what it meant to be his mother. That worth was never mine to take away, and neither was his life.
Even those who generally support abortion during the very early stages of pregnancy know this to be true, which is why support for abortion restrictions climbs sharply once you move past the first trimester.
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A Harvard-Harris poll found that 72% of Americans said abortion should be limited to 15 weeks or earlier, while another Harvard-Harris poll found that just 10% support allowing abortion through nine months.
In other words, Healey and the Massachusetts Democrats weren’t overriding some fringe position when they gutted the state’s restrictions; they were overriding the consensus. Theirs is the fringe position now, held by just nine other Democrat-run states, in addition to some of the most totalitarian countries in the world, such as China.
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You’d think that fact might give Democrats pause. Instead, Healey and the women surrounding her on Monday looked overjoyed — smiling, applauding, celebrating a policy that is, by any honest reckoning, both logically and morally indefensible.
This law does something else, too: it severs women from the very instincts that make motherhood what it is. As mothers, the question that motivates us, that gives us purpose, that reorders everything else in our lives around it, is: What do we owe the lives entrusted to us? We ask it at 2 a.m. with a crying newborn who can’t tell us what’s wrong. We ask it when they’re sick, when they’re struggling, when they need something we can’t yet name.
The answer, every time, is that we owe them unconditional love and care. That question doesn’t start at birth. It starts the moment we understand there is a life to answer for. And at 24 weeks — hell, much, much earlier than that — there is no honest way to pretend that moment hasn’t already come.
This law asks something different of women. It asks us to pretend the question doesn’t apply yet — to treat a baby at 24 weeks not as a life entrusted to us, but as a decision that ends the moment we stop wanting it to continue; and to treat the same instinct that governs a mother at 2 a.m. with her newborn as irrelevant three months earlier, as if a mother’s obligation has an on/off switch a doctor can flip.
It doesn’t. It never has. And no law, however cheerfully signed, can make that instinct go away. It can only ask women to ignore it.