Catholic group demands Massachusetts governor be excommunicated over abortion law

A leading Catholic advocacy group is calling on Massachusetts bishops to excommunicate Gov. Maura Healey after the Democrat signed legislation removing restrictions on late-term abortions, allowing for abortions up until birth.

Healey, a Catholic, signed the Prioritizing Patient Access to Care Act Aug. 10. The measure gives physicians greater judgment in determining whether to perform late-term abortions without facing legal penalties. 

Previously, Massachusetts permitted abortions after 24 weeks only if a physician determined it was necessary to preserve the mothers physical or mental health or save her life or in cases of fatal fetal diagnoses. When the new law takes effect Nov. 8, those statutory restrictions will be removed, aligning Massachusetts with states like Colorado, Maryland and Oregon, which have no gestational limits.

The advocacy group CatholicVote argued that by enacting the law, Healey committed a grave sin and should be barred from the sacraments.

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CatholicVote President Kelsey Reinhardt wrote an open letter to the Catholic Bishops of Massachusetts, asking them to clarify whether Gov. Healey's actions incurred automatic excommunication under church law.

Reinhardt pointed to canon law, which dictates that anyone who procures an abortion or assists someone in procuring one incurs an automatic (latae sententiae) excommunication.

"By the very fact of doing this — no one has to proclaim you excommunicated — you've done something so contrary to the faith that you've actually excommunicated yourself," Reinhardt told Fox News Digital in an interview. 

"The question is whether the governor signing this law makes her an accomplice in the public expansion of abortion."

Reinhardt, the mother to a child who was born at 35 weeks gestation, noted that, under this law, a child at the same gestation could be aborted.

"There's absolutely no reason ever to kill a child that has absolute viability in life and no reason to kill an innocent child in the womb. That's considered a grave sin by the Catholic Church and by natural reason as well," she told Fox News Digital.

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She said Healey's public bill signing ceremony, where abortion advocates smiled and applauded next to her, was particularly egregious for a Catholic politician.

"She didn't have to sign this law, and she didn't have to sign it in the way she signed it, which was gravely scandalous as a Catholic, with people applauding around her the death of a baby, as I mentioned, that could be born today, tomorrow, yesterday with no difficulties," Reinhardt added.

After the bill was passed in the state House of Representatives in July, the Catholic Bishops of Massachusetts released

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