Massachusetts late-term abortion extremism can be help Republicans in the midterms

Massachusetts Democrats recently made a huge moral and political blunder with national implications. They just don’t know it yet. It is up to Republicans whether they will use the great gift of contrast to their advantage.

Last month, Gov. Maura Healey (D) signed an expansion of the Bay State’s abortion law, which already allowed abortions for any reason up to six months, with exemptions thereafter. The new law allows abortion through all nine months of pregnancy, up to the moment, of birth based on the “professional judgment” of the abortionist who profits, which cannot be questioned or reviewed.

With the stroke of a pen, they joined the shameful company of only seven other nations worldwide , including Communist China.

Disturbingly, Healey and the group of lawmakers surrounding her celebrated with evident glee. The scene recalled New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) seven years earlier, lighting up One World Trade Center upon stripping all protections for unborn children out of his state’s law s .

People who rarely or never comment on abortion are expressing new shock and revulsion. At SBA Pro-Life America, as our team visits millions of homes across America, we routinely speak with horrified voters who had no idea how extreme our laws have gotten.

As summer ends, I have written to Republican candidates nationwide urging them to go on offense and fight back boldly and vocally against this extremism. If they do, our testing shows, they can shift their races 4 to 5 points in their favor. To put this in perspective, a shift that big in 2024 would have meant a 57-seat Republican Senate majority — or, in the other direction, President Kamala Harris and a Democrat-controlled House.

Democrats are vulnerable on this issue. Their pollsters and strategists know it, advising them to keep their position vague. Several Massachusetts House Democrats broke ranks and criticized the new law . More often, like Kamala Harris in 2024, they flat-out deny that elective late-term abortions happen .

These denials get less plausible all the time. By our count, Massachusetts as joined the District of Columbia and 11 other states in having no gestational limits whatsoever on abortion — a strange growth for something that supposedly never happens. In reality, the data say that abortions in America are overwhelmingly done for elective or unspecified reasons, no matter at what point in pregnancy.

In another striking example, Ohio’s U.S. Senate candidate Sherrod Brown now counts retired late-term abortionist Warren Hern as a campaign donor . Hern, who isn’t media-shy, views every pregnancy as a “medical problem .” He admits to performing sex-selection abortions and estimates that at least half of abortions at his center involved healthy mothers and healthy babies.

Like almost every other Senate and House Democrat, Brown co-sponsored legislation to turn Warren Hern’s and Massachusetts’ policy of nine-month abortions into a national mandate, forcing all 50 states to allow elective late-term abortion, paid for by taxpayers. In this year’s intense battlegrounds across the country, many ostensibly moderate Democrats are on the record supporting similar or identical laws.

Most voters need no convincing that late-term abortion in the seventh, eighth, and ninth month of pregnancy — when the baby can suck her thumb, recognize mom or dad’s voice, feel pain, and survive outside the womb with care — is abhorrent. The overwhelming constant, before and after Dobbs , is that about seven in 10 Americans reject the no-limits Democratic Party position. Even rank-and-file Democrats are less enthusiastic about abortion since Dobbs .

Nor are Americans inherently opposed to limits on late-term abortions at the national level, with exceptions, especially contrasted with the Democrats’ all-trimester legal abortion mandate. Few would even consider this a “ban,” in the Democrats’ poll-tested terms. In many cases they simply haven’t heard the argument yet.

But hear it they must. What happens in Massachusetts is not just a Massachusetts problem, it is a preview of what is coming everywhere under a future Democratic trifecta. The bill is written, sponsored, voted on, promised, and Democrats will not hesitate to eliminate the Senate filibuster to pass it.

Some on the right voice skepticism that the issue of protecting human life can get enough people to the polls, in an election dominated by concerns about affordability, healthcare, Iran and more. No one expects candidates to stop talking about these topics, of course. But the first thing to remember is that Republicans cannot win without their base.

That base is indeed passionately pro-life and expects Republicans to address more than 1.1 million lives cruelly ended each year in America. Otherwise, there will be attrition of the most engaged voters and volunteers .

Democrats have not called a truce, either. The fallacy is that the “ostrich strategy” of avoiding the abortion question on the campaign trail and just hoping to survive until it goes away is a winning plan.

Pro-life Republicans must fearlessly call out their opponents on their extremism. They must run toward the battle, not away from it. The people will stand with them.

With our help and the Democrats’ miscalculations, the tools they need to win the abortion battle are within their reach.

Marjorie Dannenfelser is president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America.