Catholic Bishops Rebuke Maura Healey Over Abortion Law

Massachusetts' four Catholic bishops have rebuked Governor Maura Healey for using her Catholic faith to justify a new law that permits abortion through all nine months of pregnancy. In a joint statement on 7 November 2026, they said they "respectfully and passionately disagree" that abortion can be called health care. The clash began a day earlier, when Healey used an emergency preamble to put the law into effect at once.

Healey signed the bill, Chapter 188 of Massachusetts General Laws, on 10 August. It removed the state's old limit on abortions after 24 weeks. Now an abortion at any point in pregnancy may be performed by a physician based on "the professional judgment of the physician."

That change alone would have been a fight. What turned it into a confrontation was how Healey forced it through, and the whole thing occured in the space of three days.

More than 100,000 registered voters had signed a petition to repeal the law. Under the state constitution, that was more than double the number needed to stop it from taking effect. Healey overrode them on 6 November by attaching an emergency preamble, and the law took effect on 8 November.

She explained herself the same day in a 1,400-word article on Substack titled "Why Massachusetts' new abortion law can't wait." She wrote: "I am Catholic, and my faith is an important part of who I am."

Maura Healey Catholic Faith Abortion Law Defence

Healey's article leaned hard on her faith. "It has shaped my understanding of service, responsibility and our obligation to care for others," she wrote. "My faith teaches me to meet people with compassion, respect their dignity, and approach suffering with humility."

She added that she governs "for people of every faith and belief" and that every family should make "deeply personal medical decisions according to their own circumstances, values and the guidance of their doctors." It was a careful piece of writing, and it was meant to settle the argument before it started.

The bishops heard something else in those words. To them, a Catholic governor was using Catholic language to bless the taking of unborn life, and they were not willing to let it pass without an answer.

Massachusetts Bishops Passionately Disagree With Healey

The statement was signed by Boston Archbishop Richard Henning, Worcester Bishop Robert McManus, Fall River Bishop Edgar da Cunha and Springfield Bishop William Byrne. It was short, and it did not mince words.

"Having read the Governor's editorial defending her decision to override the results of the Repeal188 efforts, we respectfully and passionately disagree that abortion, the taking of human life, may be considered health care," they wrote. "We also disagree that there is an emergency requiring the further expansion of the existing and already radically permissive law," they added.

Then they widened the lens. They called on lawmakers "to reconsider the troubling state of our culture and its utilitarian and merciless approach to the elderly, the sick, the vulnerable, and the unborn." It was not just a rebuke of one governor. It was a rebuke of a whole way of thinking.

They borrowed a line from Pope Leo XIV Welcomed by 3 Million in Peru Today, who recently told leaders in Uruguay that the unborn "already belong to the human family." The bishops quoted him again: "The right to life is the indispensable foundation of every other human right."

What Chapter 188 Does and Why the Repeal Fight Matters

Before Healey's law, Massachusetts allowed abortions without limit up to 24 weeks, and after that only to save the mother's life or protect her physical or mental health, or if the foetus could not survive outside the womb. Chapter 188 swept those limits away, and it did so over the heads of the voters who had signed to stop it.

The repeal campaign is not over. Healey wrote that voters will get their say in November 2028, and that "if they choose to repeal the law, we will respect their decision." Her spokesman, asked about the bishops' criticism, simply pointed reporters back to her Substack article.

Pro-life leaders in the state say they are not backing down. Myrna Maloney Flynn, president of Massachusetts Citizens for Life, said the state constitution "does not include any mechanisms for reversal" of an emergency preamble, but added that her side is "undeterred."

"We've got a two-year campaign ahead of us, and I am confident that we will have a formidable team to help us repeal Governor Healey's full-term abortion law in 2028," Flynn said. Two years is a long time to keep a campaign alive, and she knows it.

The numbers behind the fight are stark. Clinician-provided abortions in the United States have risen since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, from roughly 930,000 in 2020 to more than one million each year since 2023, according to data from the Guttmacher Institute. The bishops' statement lands in the middle of that climb, and it will not be the last word.

The fight is the latest in a year when faith has collided with politics in public, from James Talarico Wins Texas Senate Seat as First Democrat Since 1988 to Breaking: Pastor Adam Hamilton Wins Kansas Senate Seat First Democrat Since 1932. But this one is different, because it is not about a candidate. It is about four bishops telling a governor, in public, that her faith does not mean what she says it means.

The law is in effect, the referendum is two years away, and the bishops have drawn their line. What happens next depends on whether 100,000 signatures turn into a campaign that can outlast a governor, and whether a woman who says her faith shaped her will answer the bishops who say it should have shaped her differently.