What happens when abortion has no limit?
Izabela Patriota
August 14, 2026
Massachusetts has just become the tenth American state with no gestational limit on abortion. With the change, the state joins Alaska, Colorado, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, and Vermont. Combined with Washington, D.C., there are now eleven U.S. jurisdictions where the law does not set a specific week after which abortion is prohibited.
Until now, Massachusetts allowed the procedure up to 24 weeks, with certain exceptions.
The first reaction to the phrase “abortion with no gestational limit” tends to conjure the image of a woman who carried a pregnancy for seven, eight, or nine months and simply changed her mind. But that image has little to do with the reality of abortions performed in the final stages of pregnancy.
In the United States, CDC data show that 78.6% of abortions occur by the ninth week and 92.8% by the 13th. Only 1.1% occur from the 21st week onward.
This happens for a reason that should be fairly intuitive. A woman who does not want to have a child has no incentive to remain pregnant for months before ending the pregnancy. Pregnancy imposes real physical and emotional discomforts: about 70% of pregnant women experience nausea and vomiting, while roughly half suffer from lower back or pelvic pain.
More importantly, from a medical standpoint, terminating a pregnancy legally and under proper conditions is safer for the woman than carrying it to term. Pregnancy is not a risk-free condition: it increases the likelihood of hemorrhaging, infections, hypertension, thrombosis, and other potentially serious complications. If a woman already knows she does not wish to continue the pregnancy, the costs and risks of pregnancy itself are incentives for the termination to happen as early as possible.
Late-term cases, then, are exceptional precisely because their circumstances also tend to be exceptional. Often, these are deeply wanted pregnancies.
These are women who spent months preparing to welcome that child — who had already chosen a name, bought the layette, set up the nursery, and shared the news with family and friends. Until, in the second or third trimester, an exam reveals a severe malformation, a condition incompatible with life, or a complication that completely changes the course of that pregnancy.
It was precisely this kind of situation that drove the change in Massachusetts. According to the state government itself, patients with wanted pregnancies that became medically complex ended up having to travel to other states because their cases didn’t safely fit within the exceptions provided for in the law.
Massachusetts could have responded by expanding its list of exceptions. It chose a different path: it eliminated the limit and handed the decision to the woman and her doctor.
A longer-standing example is Canada, which has had no legal gestational limit on abortion since 1988. Nearly four decades of experience have not turned late-term abortion into a routine practice.
According to the Public Health Agency of Canada, only about 2.5% of terminations occur after the 21st week. The agency also states that procedures performed at advanced stages are generally linked to severe congenital or chromosomal anomalies, some of which are identified only after tests conducted in the second trimester.
The absence of a legal limit, then, does not exist to encourage women to wait. It exists to provide legal certainty to those who never intended to arrive at that decision in the first place.
It’s possible to view an abortion performed at eight weeks as morally different from one performed at eight months. But it is precisely in that second case that a law written in advance runs into situations that rarely fit neatly into a perfectly drafted list of exceptions.
Massachusetts decided that, faced with these extraordinary cases, the question should not be whether the tragedy experienced by that woman fits the exception drafted by a lawmaker. It should be whether she and her doctor consider that decision necessary.
Originally published in Portuguese by Crusoé.