Massachusetts abolishes every limit on late-term abortion

On 10 August 2026, the Governor of Massachusetts signed into law a measure removing every legal restriction on abortion after twenty-four weeks of pregnancy. The state becomes the eleventh in the United States to impose no limit at all on the putting to death of the unborn child. The state's four bishops have called the measure “gravely immoral.”

God's law knows no week in which the child would cease to be a man. The fifth commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” forbids taking the life of the innocent, and the conceived child is innocent above all. The Catechism of the Council of Trent teaches that this prohibition binds every man without exception, and that no judgment, no authority, no “choice” makes lawful the murder of the weak. To strip the child of the protection of human law does not remove him from the protection of God; it only burdens the conscience of those who order it, vote it, and promulgate it.

Under the former law, abortion after twenty-four weeks was permitted only to preserve the life or the physical or mental health of the woman, or in the case of a lethal or grave fetal anomaly. The new text authorizes it on the physician's sole “professional judgment” and removes the requirement that it be performed in a hospital. The House of Representatives had passed it on 22 July, the Senate on 31 July; the Governor, a Catholic and a longtime defender of abortion, signed it on 10 August. In a joint statement of 29 July, the four bishops recalled their “moral responsibility to present and defend Catholic teaching and the sacred, God-given dignity of all human life, from conception to natural death.”

Sources. Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), on the fifth commandment. Sacred Scripture, Exodus XX, 13 (“Thou shalt not kill”) and Jeremias I, 5 (“Before I formed thee in the bowels of thy mother, I knew thee”). Council of Trent, Session VI, on the divine law and the interior man.