Massachusetts Ends 24-Week Abortion Limit, Becomes 10th State With No Gestational Cutoff

Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey signed H.5595, the Prioritizing Patient Access to Care Act, on Monday, August 10. The law scraps the state's old 24-week abortion limit and replaces it with a single standard: a physician's professional judgment, full stop.

There's no gestational cutoff anymore. None. The old law let abortions happen after 24 weeks only under specific conditions, to save the mother's life or health, or because of a lethal fetal anomaly. The new law deletes that list entirely. A doctor decides. That's it.

Massachusetts is now the 10th state, plus Washington, D.C., with no gestational limit on abortion, joining Alaska, Colorado, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon and Vermont, according to Newsweek, citing data from the health policy research group KFF. The National Catholic Register counted it as the 11th jurisdiction in that camp when including D.C. separately.

How it happened, fast

This wasn't a slow burn. Rep. Christine Barber filed the bill at the start of the two-year legislative session, but it sat until July 22, when it got released from the House Ways and Means Committee, according to CommonWealth Beacon. From there it moved fast: the House passed it 119-33 that same day, the Senate passed it 15-4 on July 31, and Healey signed it 10 days later.

Barber is running for an open state Senate seat this fall. Every Republican who voted, voted no. Nine Democrats also voted against it: Reps. Brian Ashe, Lisa Field, Michael Finn, Dennis Gallagher, Russell Holmes, Christopher Markey, Francisco Paulino, Alan Silvia and Jeffrey Turco. The chamber's one independent, Rep. Susannah Whipps, voted yes. The law takes effect in 90 days, per Healey's office.

Healey's case for it

Healey framed the change around families who got devastating diagnoses late in pregnancy and had nowhere to turn in-state. "I've heard heartbreaking stories from women and families who were preparing to welcome a healthy baby into their family, only to receive devastating news later in their pregnancy," she said, according to Newsweek. "Instead of being able to rely on the doctors they knew and trusted at home, they were forced to travel hundreds of miles and pay out of their pockets while navigating unimaginable grief."

House Judiciary Committee Chair Rep. Mike Day, who backed the bill, said the old four-part legal test was actually scaring hospitals away from performing abortions patients already qualified for under existing law, according to WGBH. Doctors, he said, were afraid of running afoul of the specific-reasons requirement even in cases that should've clearly qualified. If hospitals were declining care out of legal caution rather than medical judgment, that's a system failure regardless of where you stand on abortion. No hospital-level data or count of turned-away patients was cited in these reports to quantify how often that happened.

The other side's case

Republican state Rep. Alyson Sullivan-Almeida called it plainly: "The precedent that we're setting is that a mother can get an abortion up until the moment of birth for a healthy, viable baby," she said, according to Breitbart. That's the core objection. There is no exception carved out anymore for a healthy, viable pregnancy late in the third trimester. The law doesn't require a life-threatening condition or fetal anomaly. It requires a doctor's professional judgment, which is a much lower and far vaguer bar.

Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of SBA Pro-Life America, didn't hold back: "It should shock the conscience that tens of thousands of unborn Americans are barbarically dismembered limb by limb and torn apart every single year," she said in a statement carried by Breitbart, the Washington Examiner and the National Catholic Register. She's also right on the numbers front. The U.S. is one of eight countries worldwide with no gestational abortion limit, and the Charlotte Lozier Institute found 46 of 50 European countries cut off abortion access after 15 weeks, per the National Catholic Register.

What the numbers actually show

Context matters here. Guttmacher Institute data cited by the Washington Examiner shows nearly 80% of U.S. abortions happen before 10 weeks, and over 90% happen by 13 weeks. Second-trimester-or-later abortions make up roughly 8% of the total, about 88,000 a year nationally. Most of those later procedures are done via dilation and evacuation, a surgical method involving cervical dilation and removal of the fetus and placenta.

So this law mostly affects a small, high-stakes slice of cases. But it removes any legal backstop for that slice entirely, which is what supporters and opponents are fighting over.

Dannenfelser used the moment to push Republicans nationally: "The GOP must abandon the 'leave it to the states' position," she said, calling for federal protections instead. That's a notable break from the post-Roe conservative consensus that punted the issue to states, and it's a fight likely to resurface as more blue states follow Massachusetts' lead. The law takes effect roughly in November 2026.