26 Aug 2026 Curtis Hill: Massachusetts Is Failing Its Children. Washington Must Act

“America needs a federal law that prohibits the intentional killing of viable unborn children — plainly stated, a federal prohibition on child homicide,” writes former Indiana Attorney General Curtis T. Hill, Jr., who now serves with the Free Enterprise Project and Project 21.

In a commentary published at Daily Caller, Curtis explains:

Massachusetts now joins a small group of states and the District of Columbia that have abandoned objective protections for the unborn after viability. These jurisdictions now allow a distinct, living human being — capable of surviving outside the womb — to be deliberately destroyed under the elastic label of “professional judgment.”

…When the state removes statutory guardrails and substitutes an unreviewable standard that permits ending a viable child’s life, it has moved beyond the privacy-versus-life debate. It is, in substance, the state-sanctioned killing of a viable unborn child — what should rightly be understood as child homicide.

Read Curtis’s commentary below.

When the Supreme Court correctly consigned Roe v. Wade to the ash heap of history, clear-thinking Americans knew it was a necessary legal correction — not the finish line. The decision restored constitutional order by rejecting a fabricated right to end a pregnancy and returning the issue to the people. For those of us who have spent careers defending the fundamental right to life, that ruling was an opening salvo.

Curtis T. Hill, Jr.

What has followed proves the point. Untethered from any objective moral or legal baseline, a growing number of states have sprinted toward the extreme. Massachusetts is the latest and clearest example.

On August 10, 2026, Democrat Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey signed the Prioritizing Patient Access to Care Act. The statute strips away the prior framework that limited post-24-week abortions to narrow circumstances — life of the mother, severe fetal conditions, or similar exceptions — and replaces it with a single standard: the physician’s “professional judgment.” No medical review may override that judgment. Massachusetts has effectively removed any clear gestational limit.

Massachusetts now joins a small group of states and the District of Columbia that have abandoned objective protections for the unborn after viability. These jurisdictions now allow a distinct, living human being — capable of surviving outside the womb — to be deliberately destroyed under the elastic label of “professional judgment.”

Let us be precise. The central act authorized here is not healing. It is the intentional termination of a human life. When the state removes statutory guardrails and substitutes an unreviewable standard that permits ending a viable child’s life, it has moved beyond the privacy-versus-life debate. It is, in substance, the state-sanctioned killing of a viable unborn child — what should rightly be understood as child homicide.

There may be defenses available in particular circumstances. A physician might attempt to assert necessity or other justifications. But the legislative choice itself is not ambiguous. By replacing clear boundaries with an open-ended grant of professional discretion, Massachusetts has cemented into law a framework that treats the deliberate ending of viable human life as an acceptable, state-sanctioned outcome. That is not a medical policy disagreement. It is the authorization of child homicide.

The philosophical foundation is bankrupt. No coherent constitutional or moral principle allows a privacy interest to override the existence of a fully formed, viable child. Without life, every other right is meaningless. Claiming that a mother’s autonomy extinguishes a child’s right to take a first breath rejects the most basic premise of ordered liberty.

We have seen this trajectory before. Years ago, New York celebrated extreme abortion expansions by lighting the One World Trade Center spire pink. The celebrations have quieted, but the institutionalization of the extreme has accelerated. When a child’s right to life depends entirely on which side of a state line the mother happens to stand, the nation is failing its most fundamental duty.

The Declaration of Independence does not offer a conditional guarantee. It declares that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, and that the first among them is life. A purely localized approach that permits some states to become internal havens for the destruction of viable children is incompatible with that founding commitment.

America needs a federal law that prohibits the intentional killing of viable unborn children — plainly stated, a federal prohibition on child homicide. The constitutional structure provides the means. The moral imperative is clear: Establish a national floor that protects the most vulnerable among us, regardless of geography.

Free enterprise begins with life. A society that treats the deliberate killing of viable children as a matter of professional discretion has lost the moral foundation on which every other liberty, including economic freedom, ultimately rests.

Curtis Hill is Senior Advisor to the Free Enterprise Project of the National Center for Public Policy Research, a Project 21 ambassador, and former Indiana Attorney General. This first appeared at Daily Caller.