There's an idol described in Scripture with the body of a man and the head of a bull. His arms stretch out in front of him, heated red by a fire burning in his belly. Parents in the ancient world walked their children up to those arms and let go. The idol was Molech, and the exchange was always the same: a child, handed over, for a promise of prosperity. This week Massachusetts became the tenth state in the country with no gestational limit on abortion at all, and I don't think that's a coincidence to bring up in the same breath as an idol that's supposedly three thousand years dead.
What Massachusetts Actually Did
On August 10, 2026, Governor Maura Healey signed the Prioritizing Patient Access to Care Act, and it does exactly what the name tries to soften. The law wipes out the state's previous 24-week cutoff and hands the decision to physicians, who can now perform an abortion later in pregnancy based on their own professional judgment, with no statutory ceiling at all. Massachusetts joins Alaska, Colorado, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington, D.C. as places with no gestational limit whatsoever. The bill passed the state House 119 to 33, largely on party lines, and nine House Democrats broke from their own party to vote against it, which tells you this wasn't just Republicans crying foul. The law takes effect in ninety days.
Supporters are framing this as compassion for families facing devastating late-pregnancy diagnoses, and I don't doubt some of the stories behind the bill are real and heartbreaking. But removing a statutory limit doesn't carve out an exception for hard cases. It removes the limit, period, for every case.
An Old Argument With a New Name
Child sacrifice doesn't look the same today as it did in the ancient Near East, but the underlying trade hasn't changed as much as we'd like to think.
"Molech promised prosperity for a child. The modern version promises autonomy, convenience, an unburdened future. Different currency. Same altar." (Marc Little, Episode 67)
The Old Testament doesn't leave room for ambiguity on where God stands on this.
"Do not give any of your children to be sacrificed to Molek, for you must not profane the name of your God. I am the LORD." (Leviticus 18:21, NIV)
The command wasn't written into a vacuum. It was written into a world where child sacrifice to Molech was an actual, organized religious practice among Israel's neighbors. God wasn't inventing a hypothetical prohibition. He was drawing a hard line against something people were really doing.
A Disproportionate Toll
The impact of abortion in this country has never landed evenly, and that deserves to be said plainly. According to the CDC's most recent Abortion Surveillance report, covering 2022 data from the states that report by race, Black women accounted for nearly 40 percent of reported abortions, despite being roughly 7 percent of the total U.S. population. I want to be careful with that number because CDC reporting isn't complete for every state, but even accounting for that limitation, the disparity shows up consistently across CDC and Guttmacher Institute data going back years.
"Every population needs what demographers call a replacement rate. A community that is not producing at replacement rate is a community in decline." (Marc Little, Episode 67)
This isn't an abstract demographic footnote. It's a question about whether a community's future gets to exist at all.
What No One Tells You Beforehand
Through my work with No Longer Bound, the ministry I lead for people navigating the grief and spiritual aftermath of abortion and miscarriage, I've sat with people carrying decisions they made decades ago. Some researchers and clinicians use the term post-abortion stress to describe the grief, guilt, and trauma symptoms a portion of women report in the years after an abortion. I'll say upfront that it isn't a formally recognized diagnosis in the DSM, and the research on how common it is stays contested. What isn't contested, because I've watched it in person more times than I can count, is that a lot of women walk into that decision without anyone sitting them down first and telling them what the next twenty years might actually feel like.
"Nobody told them. Nobody sat them down before the decision and told them what they're inviting into the next twenty years of their life." (Marc Little, Episode 67)
And if you're someone reading this who already made that choice, or watched someone you love make it, hear this before you hear anything else I've written here.
"Whatever choice you or someone else has already made, there's no wound too old and no shame too heavy for grace to reach." (Marc Little, Episode 67)
Key Takeaways
- Massachusetts now has no gestational limit on abortion. The Prioritizing Patient Access to Care Act, signed August 10, 2026, removes the state's prior 24-week cutoff entirely.
- This is the tenth state with no limit at all. Massachusetts joins Alaska, Colorado, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington, D.C.
- The ancient logic of Molech has not disappeared. It has changed its currency from prosperity to autonomy, but the underlying trade is the same.
- Grace reaches every wound. Whatever decision has already been made, No Longer Bound exists to walk alongside people carrying that grief.
Choose Wisely
Laws like the one Massachusetts just passed aren't just policy. They're a mirror held up to what a society has decided a child is worth against what a society has decided autonomy is worth. Every generation gets asked to answer that question for itself, and every generation likes to think its answer is more enlightened than the ones before it. Molech's altar went cold a long time ago. The question it forced people to answer never did.
Until next time, choose wisely: Yahweh or Molech. Your choice makes a difference.