Governor Maura Healey signed a bill removing the state's 24-week gestational limit on abortion, but at least nine Democrats in her own party voted against it, with one calling the law "barbaric."
Healey put her signature on the Prioritizing Patient Access to Care Act on Aug. 10 at the Massachusetts State House in Boston, making the Bay State the tenth in the nation to permit abortion through all nine months of pregnancy. The law strips away the previous 24-week threshold and hands physicians broad discretion to perform late-term abortions based on their own professional medical judgment. It also shields healthcare workers from legal penalties that could have applied under prior statute.
The bill passed the Massachusetts House 119, 33 on July 22, largely along party lines. But the vote was not unanimous among Democrats. Nine House Democrats broke ranks and voted against the legislation alongside Republicans, a notable fracture in a state where the party holds overwhelming majorities.
Four of those dissenting Democrats spoke publicly about their opposition, and their language was blunt enough to sound like it came from across the aisle.
State Rep. Jeffrey Turco, a Democrat representing Winthrop, offered the sharpest rebuke. He told Fox News Digital the new law represents a position far outside the mainstream.
"This new law represents an extremist and dangerous position. To be clear, it allows abortion anytime, unrestricted, and in many cases, publicly funded until the moment of birth."
Turco did not stop there. He called the law "barbaric" and accused legislative leadership of ramming it through without adequate public input, saying the bill was "rushed through the legislative process in two weeks, without an opportunity for the public to weigh in." He added that the measure was "out of step with the views of the average person in Massachusetts."
That last claim deserves attention. Massachusetts is one of the most reliably Democratic states in the country. If a Democrat from Winthrop believes the law exceeds what his own constituents can accept, it raises a fair question about how far ahead of voters the state's progressive leadership has moved on this issue. As we reported when Healey signed the bill, the measure drew immediate national scrutiny.
State Rep. Chris Markey, a Democrat from Dartmouth, echoed Turco's concerns in more measured but equally pointed terms.
"I am deeply disappointed in the passage of this bill. This bill creates a very slippery slope. I believe this law puts doctors in a very difficult ethical dilemma, as well as conflicts with long-standing criminal case law."
Markey went further, drawing a distinction that progressive advocates rarely acknowledge, that supporting abortion rights in principle does not require supporting abortion without limits in practice.
"This law, I believe, is not consistent with the beliefs of the vast majority of my constituents. While many are pro-choice, you can still be pro-choice and see this law as going beyond the norms of acceptability."
That framing matters. Markey is not a pro-life Republican making a predictable objection. He is a Democrat telling his own party that it has overreached, and that his constituents know it. The bill had already cleared the state Senate before reaching Healey's desk, as we covered when the upper chamber sent it forward.
State Rep. Dennis Gallagher, a Democrat from the Plymouth area, took a somewhat different approach. He affirmed that abortion should remain a decision between a woman and her doctor but said the new law went beyond what existing protections already allowed. Massachusetts law already permitted abortions after 24 weeks when the mother's health was at risk or in cases of severe fetal anomalies.
"At that point in a pregnancy, if the health of the mother is fine and the baby's health is fine, I just think alternatives should be encouraged for that baby."
Gallagher acknowledged the difficulty of his position, "So that's what I struggled with", but concluded that the existing framework did not need to be dismantled. His argument rested on a simple premise: when both mother and child are healthy, the state should encourage options other than termination. That principle has found expression elsewhere in recent months, including in the case of Baby Gabriel in Texas, where a surrogate chose birth over the biological parents' demand for an abortion.
State Rep. Alan Silvia, a pro-life Democrat from Bristol, was the most direct of the four. He framed his opposition in moral terms and did not hedge.
"My position has been consistent: I believe in protecting human life, including the life of the unborn. We go to extraordinary lengths as a society to protect vulnerable life, saving whales and saving strays, yet when it comes to an unborn child, that same sense of protection too often seems to disappear."
Silvia added that he could not "support policies that continue to expand abortion, particularly in the later stages of pregnancy," and pledged to "stand by my convictions and vote accordingly." A pro-life Democrat is a rare species in 2026 Massachusetts politics. That Silvia felt confident enough to say so publicly suggests the law's reach troubles voters who do not fit neatly into either party's activist wing.
Governor Healey defended the law by arguing it would prevent families facing medical complications late in pregnancy from having to travel out of state to obtain an abortion. Her office did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment after the article's publication.
At the signing, Healey offered a broader commitment. "Abortion will remain safe. It will remain legal, and it will remain accessible here in Massachusetts. That's my commitment to you," she said.
State Rep. Lindsay N. Sabadosa, the Northampton Democrat who sponsored the bill, cast the law as a matter of medical access. She argued that removing gestational barriers would let patients "rely on their providers to deliver medically appropriate care without restrictions that can fail to account for the complexity of individual medical circumstances."
That framing, "medically appropriate care", does heavy lifting. It implies the decision belongs solely to physicians and patients. But the dissenting Democrats pointed out that the law does not limit late-term abortions to medical emergencies. It removes the gestational threshold entirely, leaving the determination to a doctor's professional judgment with no statutory guardrail.
With Healey's signature, Massachusetts became the tenth state to allow abortion up to birth. It joins Alaska, Colorado, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, and Vermont, along with the District of Columbia. The new law takes effect in 90 days.
SBA Pro-Life America, a national anti-abortion organization, condemned the signing. Its president, Marjorie Dannenfelser, issued a statement arguing that the United States now stands among only eight countries worldwide that permit abortion at any point in pregnancy.
"It should shock the conscience that tens of thousands of unborn Americans are barbarically dismembered limb by limb and torn apart every single year."
That international comparison is worth sitting with. The United States regularly lectures other nations on human rights. Yet on the question of gestational limits, most of Europe, including progressive Scandinavian countries, draws the line far earlier than American blue states now do. The composition of the Supreme Court will continue to shape how far states can push these boundaries, a factor that gained renewed attention when Justice Alito recently confirmed he would remain on the bench.
The article identified four of the nine Democrats who voted against the bill. The other five remain unnamed. Whether those five chose silence out of political caution or simply were not asked is unclear. But the fact that four were willing to go on the record, using words like "extremist," "barbaric," and "slippery slope", suggests the internal discomfort runs deeper than the final vote count might indicate.
The speed of the legislative process added to the frustration. Turco claimed the bill moved from introduction to passage in roughly two weeks, with no meaningful opportunity for public testimony. In a state with 6.9 million residents and a legislature that prides itself on deliberation, that pace raises its own questions about accountability.
Healey and the bill's supporters framed the law as a safeguard, protection for families in crisis, for doctors exercising judgment, for a state determined to preserve abortion access regardless of what happens at the federal level. The dissenting Democrats did not dispute the right to abortion. They disputed the removal of every limit on when it can happen.
When members of a governor's own party call her signature legislation "barbaric" and "extremist," the problem is not messaging. The problem is the policy itself, and the growing gap between what progressive leaders will sign and what even their own voters are willing to accept.
