Massachusetts & the Battle for Reproductive Rights: A Surprising yet Pivotal Legacy

By Mariana Brandman, Ph.D. 

The “great struggle to change our abortion laws,” argued Massachusetts activist Florence Luscomb in 1971, “is part of one continuous battle for women’s rights.” The 84-year-old Luscomb knew of what she spoke: a veteran of the women’s suffrage and labor movements, she had been fighting for  women’s rights since the turn of the twentieth century. Activists have continued to battle for reproductive rights in the half-century since Luscomb made this declaration. Massachusetts has played a key role in the fight, though not always in ways we would expect today. 

In 1969, the Boston Globe reported on the “major problem” of abortion in Massachusetts, noting that, “More women than ever before are violating or circumventing the state’s 124-year-old [birth control statutes].” These statutes, known as Massachusetts’s Crimes Against Chastity, Morality, Decency and Good Order laws, not only banned nearly all abortions, they also prohibited unmarried individuals from getting information about, much less actual contraception, even from licensed physicians. 

The only way to obtain a legal abortion in Massachusetts prior to 1973 was to get the approval of at least two doctors, including a psychiatrist, who believed that carrying the pregnancy to term would cause serious physical or mental harm. Or as Dr. Laurent Delli-Bovi, founder and medical director of Women’s Health Services in Brookline, put it: “You basically had to go before a panel of psychiatrists and convince them that you were suicidal to be allowed to get a legal abortion.” 

It was not long, however, before two landmark U.S. Supreme Court cases, one originating in Massachusetts, fundamentally transformed reproductive rights in the Bay State.

Boston University Students Take a Stand

On April 6, 1967, roughly 2,000 Boston University students gathered to witness their invited speaker, birth control advocate William Baird, challenge the statutes that prohibited access to contraception by lecturing about birth control and distributing condoms to a few single female students eager to contest the laws. As expected, Boston police immediately arrested Baird. His case, Eisenstadt v. Baird, reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972. The court struck down the Massachusetts law, finding that it violated the Equal Protection clause, and established unmarried individuals’ rights to contraceptive access, just as the 1965 case Griswold v. Connecticut had for married couples.

A year after the 1972 conference at B.U., the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade that the Constitution protected a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy, for any reason, before the third trimester. The ruling relied in part on the “right to privacy” groundwork laid by both Griswold and Eisenstadt. Massachusetts women no longer had to convince a panel of doctors of the harm that childbirth would cause them in order to obtain safe and legal abortion care. 

Massachusetts: A Model for Abortion Restrictions

Abortion opponents quickly began battling to reverse the ruling and to restrict abortion access. A majority of Massachusetts citizens supported the right to abortion (62% according to a 1971 Boston Globe poll), but the issue was hotly contested, in part due to the state’s large Catholic population and the Church’s strong anti-abortion stance. In fact, in 1974 Massachusetts became the first state in the country to pass a parental consent law, which mandated that a minor receive the approval of both her parents when seeking an abortion. It provided a model for 35 more states to enact similar laws.

In 1978, Massachusetts passed the Flynn-Boyle Bill – its own version of the federal Hyde Amendment, a rule that prevented Medicaid from covering abortion – to ensure that state funds could not be used to pay for abortions. However, in 1981 the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court found in Moe v. Secretary of Administration and Finance that the due process clause of the state constitution protected a woman’s right to abortion, including funding for those eligible for state insurance. 

Reproductive Rights in Massachusetts Today

In 2020, Massachusetts yet again made history, this time as the first state to repeal its parental consent law. Even after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and the federal right to abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), Massachusetts still guarantees the right to abortion access thanks to the 1981 ruling in Moe. The Commonwealth further guaranteed Massachusetts’ commitment to abortion rights in July 2022, when it passed a shield law to protect reproductive and gender-affirming healthcare in the state. The measure safeguards medical professionals who provide care to out-of-state patients, whether in-person or via telemedicine, and prohibits law enforcement from assisting in any investigation related to reproductive healthcare. In the meantime, the national fight for reproductive rights remains a central part of the “one continuous battle for women’s rights'' that began nearly two centuries ago.