Massachusetts House lawmakers, in their infinite compassion, just voted 119 to 33, pretty much along party lines, to essentially green-light abortions with almost no restrictions. They’re shipping this thing over to the Senate like it’s some urgent piece of infrastructure. The bill strips away the state’s previous limit on most abortions after 24 weeks. That’s the point where a lot of babies can survive outside the womb. Now, it’s all up to a physician’s “professional judgment.” Translation: whatever the doctor feels like.

Physicians apparently told lawmakers the old law wasn’t “meeting patients’ needs.” Needs. Let’s sit with that word for a second. Because the new language says an abortion “may be performed by a physician based upon the professional judgment of the physician.” No hard lines. No real guardrails. Just vibes and a white coat.

Supporters trotted out the usual sob stories, y’know, victims of sex trafficking held captive and assaulted. Rep. Michael Day said that’s part of what drove this. Heartbreaking situations, no question. But notice how these bills always start with the extreme hard cases and then swallow the entire principle. They’re not carving out narrow exceptions for the worst tragedies. They’re rewriting the rules so that “professional judgment” can cover just about anything after 24 weeks.

Major hospital systems like Mass General Brigham, Tufts, Beth Israel, UMass Memorial sent a letter cheering it on. They complained that patients get “new information” around 24 weeks and sometimes have to travel out of state. They mean that they might find out their child may not be perfect.

Meanwhile, Massachusetts Citizens for Life is calling it what it looks like: an abortion-up-to-birth bill. Their president, Myrna Maloney Flynn, pointed out the obvious that this lets one doctor subjectively decide that a viable infant, one capable of surviving outside the womb and feeling pain, can be killed in or outside a hospital.

“My body, my choice,” the signs said during those 2022 protests. Funny how that choice never seems to include the body of the child who’s developed lungs, a heartbeat that’s been detectable for months, and the ability to react to stimuli.

This is where the mask slips. For years they told us abortion was about early, safe, rare. Then the rare part got thrown overboard. Now we’re debating whether a baby who could live if delivered should instead be terminated because a physician exercises “judgment.” The same medical establishment that lectured us endlessly during COVID about following the science suddenly wants total discretion when it comes to ending a viable pregnancy.

Democrats in Massachusetts did this the same way they do everything: quietly expand the boundaries, wrap it in the language of compassion and “patient empowerment,” and dare anyone to object without being called heartless. Meanwhile, the actual women in desperate situations are used as human shields for a policy that goes far beyond those cases. It’s classic. Every time.

This isn’t progress. It’s a radical rejection of the basic idea that human life has value even when it’s inconvenient or late in development. The people pushing this know exactly what they’re doing. They’re betting that most Americans are too distracted, too polite, or too intimidated to say plainly what this is: the normalization of ending the lives of babies who could survive, simply because the adults involved decided otherwise.

Massachusetts just took another step toward making that the law of their land. And they did it with big health systems and comfortable legislators leading the way. The rest of us should watch carefully. Because these precedents don’t stay quarantined in one blue state. They spread. And the conversation they want you to have is always about “choice” right up until the moment you notice what, exactly, is being chosen.