The U.S. Supreme Court may overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey next month, sending abortion law back to the states.
It won’t affect Massachusetts much, other than rhetorically. Abortion is legally protected in Massachusetts by court decision and state statute.
Moreover, abortion-friendly politicians in this state of both major parties generally aren’t the “safe, legal, and rare” type. They support some extreme pro-abortion policies.
It’s a policy so crazy that former U.S. vice president Mike Pence talked about it during a speech a couple of weeks after NewBostonPost broke the news.
That’s thanks to an amended version of the city’s paid leave ordinance that passed unanimously by a voice vote during a meeting of the Boston City Council on September 15, 2021. Boston’s then-acting mayor Kim Janey signed the ordinance on September 17 and it went into effect immediately, according to a spokesman for the mayor’s office.
The city’s paid parental leave policy now includes 12 weeks of paid leave for both men and women for pregnancy loss, including all abortions for any reason.
The sponsors were current state Senator Lydia Edwards (D-East Boston) (a city councilor at the time), then-at-large city councilor Annissa Essaibi George (a recent candidate for mayor), and current mayor Michelle Wu (an at-large city councilor at the time).
The city’s paid leave scheme offers employees 100 percent of their base wages during the first four weeks of leave, then 75 percent for the next four weeks, and 50 percent for the last four weeks of leave.
2. Passive Infanticide
Remember the ROE Act?
The mainstream media keeps telling us it protects abortion in Massachusetts — as if the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court didn’t declare abortion a fundamental right in the state in 1981.
What the mainstream media won’t tell you, however, is that the ROE Act bill removed the right to guaranteed emergency medical care for a baby that is born alive after an attempted abortion.
Section 12P. If an abortion is performed pursuant to section twelve M, the physician performing the abortion shall take all reasonable steps, both during and subsequent to the abortion, in keeping with good medical practice, consistent with the procedure being used, to preserve the life and health of the aborted child. Such steps shall include the presence of life-supporting equipment, as defined by the department of public health, in the room where the abortion is to be performed.
Removing that language from state law removed the explicit need to try to save the life of a baby born alive after an attempted abortion.
State representative Patricia Haddad (D-Somerset) told NewBostonPost that was exactly what the ROE Act bill would do — and that she supported it.
“Now if that fetus is born and doesn’t have what is necessary to survive, then comfort is what will be provided,” Haddad told NewBostonPost in December 2020. “Those on the other side will claim that they know many survivors of abortion. O.K.. But we’re not talking about a compromised fetus to begin with. Others will say that doctors can be wrong. Well, that’s why the life-saving equipment is there. It’s so emotional. I don’t try to convince people to come to my side, I try to show them where they might be in error and what the intent of the law is and what the final outcomes are. We’re trying to make the process more streamlined for a young person so that it’s a pill and not an invasive process. The bottom line is I think we did a very good job.”
“When people tell me I’ll be guilty of infanticide, I have to look to myself and say that is a very untrue statement,” she added. “You have to have the courage of your convictions to know you’re doing the right thing and help people even if it only helps one woman recover and grieve from this great loss.”
Props to her for honesty. But that’s a defense of passive infanticide, which is technically different from picking a baby up and Gronk-spiking the baby to the ground to kill the baby. It’s not essentially different, but different nonetheless.
Abortion survivors are alive today. They include Melissa Ohden and Gianna Jessen, among others. It’s sad that someone would think they don’t deserve to live.
It wasn’t just Democrats who backed this one, either: state representative James Kelcourse (R-Amesbury) voted for it; Massachusetts Republican Party chairman Jim Lyons condemned him for it.
3. Elective Late-Term Abortions
U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Cambridge) is angry!
She’s very, very, very, very angry!
Warren’s feelings aside, she has some crazy views on abortion.
Specifically, she doesn’t support any restrictions on it.
So if someone wants to have an elective late-term abortion, Warren is among the Massachusetts politicians who would be cool with that.
I want to say to my Republican colleagues — the year is 2015, not 1955, and not 1895. Women have lived through a world where backward-looking ideologues tried to interfere with the basic health decisions made by a woman and her doctor, and we are not going back. Not now, not ever.
Now, “it’s [fill in current year]” is a lousy argument. Right and wrong don’t change just because the calendar changes.
And we’ll overlook Warren insinuating that only women can get pregnant.
But it’s hard to miss this one: Babies nowadays can survive outside of the womb at as early as 21 weeks. Elective abortions happen well past that point, and Warren is O.K. with it.
4. Honoring A Baby Killer
As Boston’s mayor, current U.S. Labor Secretary Marty Walsh renamed Worcester Square in the city’s South End to honor obstetrician-gynecologist-abortionist Kenneth Edelin.
That would seem to be bad enough.
But why is Edelin well known enough to get a square named for him?
Edelin was convicted of manslaughter in the death of a second-trimester baby following several failed saline abortion attempts in October 1973. It happened after Roe v. Wade legalized elective abortion in the United States but before the Massachusetts legislature passed new statutes defining restrictions on abortion after the stage of so-called viability, when an unborn child might be able to live outside the womb.
In 1975, a Suffolk County jury convicted Edelin of manslaughter. The reason: Edelin was accused of killing a baby in the womb by suffocating the baby, depriving the baby of oxygen, as Boston Magazine points out. Ultimately, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court overturned the ruling, saying that it’s only manslaughter if the baby is born alive outside of the womb, and that there wasn’t enough evidence the fetus lived outside of the womb to sustain a criminal conviction, as The New York Times reported in 1976.
The male fetus weighed 1 pound 5 ounces after Dr. Edelin extracted the fetus from the mother’s womb, according to the 1976 Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court opinion overturning his conviction for manslaughter. Various doctors estimated the fetal gestation at between 20 and 24 weeks. (The case is Commonwealth of Massachusetts vs. Edelin.)
The medical examiner testified “that there was respiratory activity, at least a gasping of breath, outside the mother,” according to a dissent written by Chief Justice Edward Hennessey. A majority of justices, however, found “that there was insufficient evidence to go to a jury of a live birth.”
Whatever the legal aspects of the case, the moral aspect of it — and of Edelin’s conduct more generally — is chilling.
Walsh calls himself a Catholic. What version of Catholicism — however distant a memory it may be — would allow someone to celebrate and honor such behavior?
He voted to ban it in 2012, and told NewBostonPost in September 2021 that he would vote the same way again if the issue came up for another vote.
“Oh yeah,” Lynch said. “Selective abortion. That’s not right. I understand when someone’s jammed up and in dire situations, but that’s a whole different. You know, we criticize China for that, so I think it wouldn’t be consistent if we weren’t opposed to that practice.”
When Lynch voted to ban sex-selective abortion in 2012, the bill failed, 246-168. He was one of 20 Democrats and the only member of the Massachusetts Congressional delegation to vote for the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act (PRENDA) of 2012 (H. R. 3541). Although a majority voted for the bill, it needed a two-thirds vote to pass because House Republicans called for a suspension of House rules — a procedure typically used to fast-track bills viewed as uncontroversial.
You know who else was in the Massachusetts congressional delegation at the time who voted against banning it? U.S. representatives Richard Neal (D-Springfield) and Jim McGovern (D-Worcester), now-U.S. Senator Ed Markey (D-Malden), and U.S. Representative Bill Keating (D-Bourne).
Sex-selective abortion is a real problem.
In the United States sex-selective abortions tend to occur among some first-generation immigrant groups where there is cultural pressure on women to have a boy, as The New York Times pointed out in 2012.
Politicians in other first-world countries like Canada and the United Kingdom — which have zero major pro-life parties — have spoken out against the practice occurring in immigrant communities in their countries, as well.
Sex-selective abortion is most prevalent in places like China, India, and South Korea, among others. However, China is the most prominent example of it. As of 2019, there had been about 23.1 million sex-selective abortions in China over the previous half-century and 20.7 million sex-selective abortions in India out of 45 million worldwide, as the scientific journal Nature reported.
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(Courtesy of Wikimedia) 
