Killing for Convenience

What Massachusetts' latest bill reveals about our anti-child mindset

Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey declared, after signing a bill removing the state’s 24-week abortion limit,

“We believe that health care decisions should be made between women and families and their doctors, not politicians. Abortion will remain safe. It will remain legal, and it will remain accessible here in Massachusetts. That’s my commitment to you.”

The new law leaves the decision entirely to a physician’s “professional judgment,” with no gestational cutoff written into statute.

For those confused, that means abortion on demand, up until birth.

Massachusetts becomes the 10th state to remove gestational age limits on abortion, joining Alaska, Colorado, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon and Vermont, along with the District of Columbia. The United States is one of only eight countries in the world that allow this barbaric practice. We’re right in line with China and South Korea.

“I stand with women,” Gov. Maura Healey proudly stated.

Well, here at Them Before Us we stand with children.

And the best part about standing with children is that defending them doesn’t put you in opposition with their mothers. The pro-abortion lobby has done a phenomenal job at pitting mother against child, but the truth is, we can support both.

When there’s a “medical emergency”

Healey said the law is intended to ensure families facing medical complications late in pregnancy can abort their babies in Massachusetts rather than having to travel out of state. Those complications can include maternal health complications and fatal diagnoses.

But let’s talk about those cases.

If there is a dangerous complication later in term, the safest thing for both patients, the mother and child, is not an abortion; it’s delivery either via C section or induced labor.

If the baby needs to be removed quickly, for the mother’s safety, then why would doctors take extra time to go in and intentionally kill the child in the womb before removing them? Why undergo a longer and more dangerous procedure?

Abortion doesn’t avoid delivery. The child still needs to be delivered. But killing the child before delivery makes the process longer and adds risk of sepsis because now there is a deceased (often dismembered) human body in the mother.

A late-term abortion generally takes 2 to 3 days. If there is an emergency, a 30-minute emergency C-section of a living child makes the most sense. Then both the mother and child can receive the best care. The attempts to justify this law by trying to “protect the mother’s health” framing do not hold up medically.

But don’t take my word for it:

The American Association of Pro-Life OBGYN’s stated in 2022:

“Women’s health does not require dead fetuses; it only requires the ability to separate from a fetus when medical safety demands it. Abortion providers do not deny that the purpose of D&E, and abortion in general, is to produce a dead fetus. The Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynaecology points out that abortion providers should be intentional about achieving feticide to avoid live birth. In the partial-birth abortion ban hearing before the Supreme Court, abortion providers claimed that their product was to produce a dead fetus, and that banning procedures which would ensure that the fetus was dead was an infringement on their trade—a telling admission about a procedure which “kills the fetus and is distinct from delivery.”

Which raises the question this article is really about: if it isn’t about the mother’s health, and it isn’t about the child’s survival either, what is it actually about?

This is the part that gets buried under all the talk of medical emergencies: most later-term abortions aren’t performed because the mother’s life is at risk, and they aren’t performed because the child is going to die anyway. They are performed on healthy mothers carrying healthy children, for no medical reason at all.

These are called “elective”.

• In 1996, Abortionist Dr. McMahon submitted a breakdown of over 2,000 later-term abortions he performed to Congress. Only 9 percent involved any maternal health indication, most commonly depression. The rest were elective.

• Dr. Haskell told American Medical News plainly, “Most of my abortions are elective in that 20 to 24 week range. In my particular case, probably 20 percent are for genetic reasons. And the other 80 percent are purely elective.”

• Mr. Fitzsimmons, director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers, told the New York Times the procedure is usually performed on a healthy mother carrying a healthy fetus that is 20 weeks along or more.

Elective.

Not to save a life.

Not because a doctor is out of options.

Because a woman decided she did not want to be pregnant anymore, and the law now lets her end that pregnancy at any point, for any reason, all the way up to birth.

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“Bodily autonomy”

Once you strip away the false framing of medical emergency and necessity you are left with a very hard truth. This is about convenience.

Having a child is hard. It is even harder when a woman is doing it without a husband, without a partner, without the support that raising a child was designed to have. And rather than face that difficulty, our society has built an entire industry supported by laws like this to let a woman avoid it, by ending the life of her child.

That is not health care. That is not bodily autonomy. That is a woman being told, by her doctor, her governor, and her culture, that her independence matters more than her child’s life, and that ending that life is an acceptable price for preserving her own convenience and control.

We are quick, and rightly so, to condemn a father who walks away from his responsibilities. The man who refuses to show up, refuses to parent, refuses to do the hard, sacrificial work. We call him a deadbeat dad and acknowledge the truth - he failed his child.

That same standard has to apply to a mother who ends her child’s life because she does not want to do the mothering. If we are willing to condemn a father for walking away from the hard thing, we cannot excuse a mother for ending a life to avoid it.

Two sides of the same coin.

This desire for control over when a child arrives, and whether a child arrives at all, is not unique to abortion. It is the same impulse driving the fertility industry, just aimed in the opposite direction.

Women freeze their eggs so a child can be delayed until it’s convenient.

An increasing number of healthy couples are turning to IVF to select embryos for superficial traits, sex of the baby, or to have the timing they want.

Intended parents hire a surrogate so they can have a child without the inconvenience of carrying one themselves, or without their own body being involved at all.

In every case, the child is being fit into the parent’s schedule and preferences rather than welcomed on their own terms.

Late-term elective abortion and the modern fertility industry are two sides of the same coin.

One destroys life on demand.
The other creates life on demand.
Both put the demand first.

“But what about the hard cases?”

I can hear the objection already. What about the mother carrying a child with a fatal diagnosis? What about the couple crushed by infertility? Don’t you dare call that convenience.

Those cases deserve care. That grief is real, and we should not pretend otherwise.

But grief does not change what a child is owed.

Aborting a dying child does not heal the child or the mother. It trades the hours a family could have spent holding, naming, and grieving their baby for a procedure that guarantees the child dies alone. Perinatal hospice exists for these families, and parents who choose it consistently say the same thing: meeting their child, even briefly, was worth everything. We do not respond to a dying grandparent by ending her ahead of schedule. The same mercy applies at life’s beginning.

And infertility, as painful as it is, does not generate a right to a child. Children are not a treatment for grief. IVF creates far more embryos than it ever delivers. Most of those tiny lives (those few that survive the first few days of the dangerous lab environment) are graded, discarded, donated to research, or frozen indefinitely. A couple grieving their inability to conceive one child is ushered into a process that routinely creates ten and loses nine.

The hard cases are genuinely hard. But look closely and they follow the same pattern. The question being answered is always what the adult can bear, and never what the child is owed.

Someone always sacrifices.

Either adults lay down their plans, their timelines, and their comfort for the child, or the child lays down her father, her mother, her siblings, or her life for the adults.

Which will we choose?

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Them Before Us is a global movement committed to defending children’s right to their mother and father. We believe that adult desires should never come at the expense of a child’s fundamental needs. Have a friend who would enjoy getting the resources TBU offers?

We are not professional lobbyists or political insiders. We are ordinary people with an extraordinary conviction: children must come first in every conversation about marriage, family, and fertility. We exist to make one thing clear: when adults sacrifice for children, society thrives. When children are forced to sacrifice for adults, everyone pays the price.

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