A MESSAGE FROM ARCHBISHOP HENNING, BISHOP MCMANUS, BISHOP DA CUNHA, AND BISHOP BYRNE FOR THE CLERGY, RELIGIOUS, AND LAY FAITHFUL OF MASSACHUSETTS In June during his Apostolic Visit to Spain, our Holy Father Pope Leo XIV delivered an appeal to defend human dignity and protect life from conception to its natural end. “Every legislative task,” he said, “ultimately confronts a decisive question: what conception of the human person inspires laws, and what kind of society do those laws build?” Just two months after the Holy Father’s address, Massachusetts passed one of the most expansive and permissive abortion laws in the nation, telling us what kind of society they desire for Massachusetts: one which leaves its most vulnerable citizens—children in the womb and their pregnant mothers—at perilous risk. This law is a tragedy, and the Catholic legislators who helped to enact it have caused grave scandal. The Prioritizing Patient Access to Care Act permits abortion throughout pregnancy for any reason, and it allows these grisly procedures—dangerous to mothers and cruel to their unborn children—to be performed in non-hospital settings. Laws function as teachers. This new law falsely teaches that human beings who are ill or inconvenient are not worthy of life; that motherhood can be incompatible with women’s freedom, well-being, and flourishing; and that no viable alternatives to abortion exist in the face of difficult diagnoses. Alternatives do exist. A 2023 peer-reviewed article published in the Cureus Journal of Medical Science found that 60% of women considering an abortion would choose life if they had more material and emotional support. We want to help women and families to choose life! We invite every expectant mother in distress to ask us for help. We ask that elected officials and healthcare providers—especially those whose consciences are rightly troubled by the new law—work to ensure that life-sustaining care for vulnerable children in utero and that mothers and fathers who feel alone and overwhelmed have all they need to welcome and raise their children with confidence. The Lord Jesus Christ saw the forgotten and reached out to the neglected. As Bishops, we call upon all to see the dignity of the poor, the unborn, the sick and the elderly. No one is expendable, no one is a burden. All have a sacred God-given dignity. The foundation of social justice is this inviolable dignity of the human person. The Prioritizing Patient Access to Care Act unjustly condemns to death our most vulnerable children and pits a mother against her own child.
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