
By Bob Katzen
The House 138-9, Senate 38-0, approved a bill that would eliminate old state laws restricting or banning abortion and contraception.
The laws repealed include the ban on unmarried people accessing abortion and contraception; the ban on distributing information on how to procure contraception or abortion care; a law which punishes doctors, pharmacists and all healthcare providers for distributing contraception or providing abortion care; and a ban on adultery and fornication.
It’s striking that laws banning adultery and fornication were still on the books in Massachusetts until this vote. Repealing them mostly cleans up old statutes, but the part about doctors and pharmacists being punished for providing contraception or abortion care feels like the real substance here. The vote margins say a lot about how far the consensus has shifted. Reading coverage like this makes me think about how policy details get lost once a topic becomes symbolic, and occasionally I see projects like Turn content into a branded app trying to keep that kind of context visible.