Pro-life advocates in Massachusetts say they have collected enough signatures to both suspend a far-reaching abortion law there and put the question before voters in the next presidential election cycle.
The state earlier this year became the latest in the U.S. to officially remove all limits on abortion. Lawmakers passed a law that permits abortion at any point in pregnancy for any reason; Democratic Gov. Maura Healey signed the bill on Aug. 10.
Opponents of abortion subsequently launched an effort to suspend and potentially repeal the law, seeking enough signatures to enact a "veto referendum" that would put the law up for a statewide vote in 2028.
The advocates needed to collect about 37,000 signatures to place the measure on the ballot; collecting just under 50,000 signatures, meanwhile, would suspend the law prior to that election.
Myrna Maloney Flynn, the president of Massachusetts Citizens for Life, told EWTN News on Oct. 30 that the initiative had collected more than 100,000 signatures toward the effort.
The pro-life coalition will deliver the signatures to the Massachusetts secretary of state, she said. "Then we'll wait for his office to formally confirm the results."
"We do not know how long his office will take to verify," she said.
She said the governor could enact an "emergency preamble" that would nullify the presumptive suspension of the law, though Healey "has not indicated her intentions" in that regard. The governor's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the initiative.
Upon its passage, the state abortion measure drew rebuke from the state's Catholic bishops, who described it as "a radical measure which is gravely immoral."
The advocacy group CatholicVote, meanwhile, called for Healey — who identifies as Catholic — to be excommunicated.
"Healey is a Catholic in a state of grave sin. She has publicly and now legislatively cooperated in the destruction of innocent human life," CatholicVote President Kelsey Reinhardt said at the time.
