1. United States
2. Mass.
3. Letter

I am writing to urge you to support H5595 and to continue defending reproductive healthcare access in Massachusetts. This bill is a necessary step toward making sure patients and their doctors can make deeply personal medical decisions without political interference, especially in the most complex and heartbreaking pregnancies. Massachusetts has built a strong reputation as a leader on reproductive freedom. Through the ROE Act, the 2022 shield law, and the later Shield Act 2.0 updates, the Commonwealth has made clear that abortion care is healthcare and that patients and providers deserve legal protection, privacy, and dignity. Those protections matter not only for Massachusetts residents, but also for people who may come here seeking care that is no longer available in their home states. H5595 is important because it addresses a real and painful gap in current law. The existing post-24-week framework relies on a narrow set of statutory categories, and supporters of reform have argued that this approach can leave families trapped in uncertainty while doctors and hospitals weigh legal language instead of responding solely to medical need. In practice, that can mean delays in care, added trauma for families, and pressure on physicians who should be using their professional judgment rather than acting as lawyers in the exam room. It is especially important to recognize that not every serious pregnancy complication or fetal diagnosis can be identified early. Some conditions are not discovered until much later in pregnancy because they require advanced anatomy scans, consultations with specialists, or genetic testing that happens only after an initial concern is identified. In some cases, families learn late in a wanted pregnancy that a fetus has a severe anomaly or genetic condition that will lead to death shortly after birth, or that survival would involve only pain, suffering, and invasive interventions with no real chance of recovery. When a family receives that kind of devastating news, they should be met with compassion, honesty, and support, not rigid legal barriers. No politician can fully understand the emotional and medical complexity of those moments for a pregnant person and their loved ones. Forcing someone to continue a pregnancy when their child may die within hours or days of being born is not an act of compassion; it is an act of cruelty that can deepen grief and prolong trauma for families already facing unimaginable circumstances. These cases are often discussed in abstract political language, but they are profoundly human. They involve parents who may have already prepared a nursery, chosen a name, told their families, and imagined a future with a child they desperately wanted. When medicine reveals that future is no longer possible, those families deserve the freedom to make the most humane decision for themselves, in consultation with the doctors who know their case best. Supporting H5595 also means trusting physicians to practice evidence-based medicine. Medical professionals are trained to evaluate risk, prognosis, patient wellbeing, and ethical obligations on a case-by-case basis. The law should support that process, not impose a one-size-fits-all framework that can never anticipate every tragic diagnosis or every threat to a patient’s physical and mental health. Massachusetts should continue to lead by protecting reproductive freedom in real terms, not just in rhetoric. If the Commonwealth believes abortion is essential healthcare, then access must be meaningful even in the hardest cases, including later in pregnancy when serious medical realities sometimes emerge. Patients should not be forced to leave the state, carry nonviable pregnancies against their will, or navigate unnecessary legal uncertainty to receive care that their doctors know is appropriate. I respectfully ask you to vote in favor of H5595 and to publicly support reproductive healthcare access in Massachusetts. When you vote on this bill tomorrow, July 22, please keep these families and these realities in mind. Supporting this bill means standing with patients, families, and providers at some of the most vulnerable moments of their lives. It means affirming that healthcare decisions belong to the people directly affected by them, not to politicians.