Friday, August 12, 2022

Chronicling the next chapter in America's battle over abortion rights.
By Stephanie Ebbert, Globe Staff

How one heartbroken mother changed abortion law

It’s rare for one person’s story to drive policy change, rarer still when that story is about abortion, an experience many might prefer not to talk about at all in this unforgiving political environment.

The deeply personal story of 39-year-old Boston mother Kate Dineen, told by my colleague Shirley Leung, has been broadly credited for changing minds and driving the recent expansion of the Massachusetts’ abortion law.

“This law would not have changed without Kate,” said Rebecca Hart Holder, executive director of Reproductive Equity Now, one of the groups that advocated for the legislative changes. “Kate was the real person who suffered the real crisis, who put herself on the line.”

When I first heard about Dineen’s case, I’ll admit, I was skeptical. It’s not that I doubted such sad circumstances, as so many deniers do these days (ahem, Ohio.) I thought Massachusetts lawmakers had already addressed them.

The ROE Act, enacted at the end of 2020, expanded exceptions for late abortions so that a patient would not have to carry a doomed pregnancy to term. Until then, Massachusetts law had only allowed abortion after 24 weeks when it was necessary to protect a woman’s life or health; the ROE Act added exceptions for cases of fatal fetal anomalies. But as Dineen demonstrated, the exceptions didn’t always apply.

Already the mother of an 18-month-old son, she was eight months pregnant when she got the devastating diagnosis: Her fetus had suffered a catastrophic stroke and, even if he survived, was likely to live a short and painful life.

“How could I ever put my child through this type of joyless existence?” Dineen recalled thinking when I spoke to her on Thursday.

This was not the “abortion on demand until birth” that abortion opponents like to claim is happening. This was a “no-choice choice,” as Dineen put it.

“I knew a termination was the way I could protect my son from pain and suffering and it was a loving choice,” she added. “But it was a profound loss.”

But Massachusetts General Hospital was unwilling to abort her pregnancy if there was a chance of survival, which they estimated was 50 percent.

So she and her husband drove 500 miles to one of the few clinics in the country that performs late abortions — contrary to what abortion opponents suggest is the norm — and spent $8,000 on the procedure.

“I had all the resources I could imagine and it was still incredibly difficult for me to access that care,” Dineen recalled.

When it became clear that the Supreme Court was going to overturn constitutional protections for abortion, Dineen began speaking out in the hope that Massachusetts lawmakers would give the ROE Act a second look and broaden its protections.

It didn’t hurt that she was politically savvy, having worked in New York state government before returning to her native Massachusetts, where she is a trade group executive and registered Beacon Hill lobbyist.

“She knew her way around politics and I think that helped,” Hart Holder said. “But it was more than that. It was a total fearlessness.”

Her story, powerfully told, shifted the debate from the theoretical to the personal.

“My kids were born at Mass General. That could have been my wife,” State Representative Jay Livingstone, a Boston Democrat and lead sponsor of the Roe Act, told Leung.

Initially, there wasn’t much political will to revisit the ROE Act, which was passed after an ugly fight, with its sponsors accused of promoting infanticide by the Massachusetts Republican Party.

Governor Charlie Baker, a Republican who supports abortion rights and is far more moderate than his party, had vetoed the Roe Act, taking exception to certain provisions such as allowing more exceptions to the ban after 24 weeks.

But after lawmakers negotiated language expanding exceptions to cases like Dineen’s — as well as a host of other measures to broaden abortion access after the Supreme Court ruling — Baker not only signed the law. He signed it twice, holding a second ceremony Tuesday where he was surrounded by left-leaning lawmakers and abortion rights advocates, including Dineen. After the event, he handed Dineen one of the ceremonial pens.

“I’m not sure if somebody’s given you one of these yet,” Dineen recalled Baker saying, “But you should have it.”

Kate Dineen, second from right, in a photo provided by Reproductive Equity Now.