Reproductive Equity Now Launches 2025-26 Massachusetts Legislative Agenda

With abortion access under threat federally, the organization’s agenda will expand abortion care in the state and further protect Massachusetts patients and providers

BOSTON (January 27, 2025) – Reproductive Equity Now is today announcing its agenda for the 2025-26 Massachusetts legislative session. The organization’s priorities are aimed at standing up to federal attacks on reproductive health care, expanding access to care for patients, and further protecting abortion and gender-affirming care providers. 

The organization’s 2025-26 priorities include: 

1. Expanding access to abortion care throughout pregnancy
   At no point in pregnancy is the government more qualified to make decisions about reproductive health care than a doctor and their patient. As President Donald Trump continues to threaten abortion access and interstate travel nationwide, Massachusetts must update state law to expand access to abortion later in pregnancy and ensure no one must leave the state for abortion care. We must trust doctors and patients—not politicians—to make informed health care decisions. Click HERE to learn more about the Prioritizing Patient Access to Care Act.

2. Making the full spectrum of pregnancy care more affordable
   The Massachusetts Legislature has taken bold action to break down cost barriers to care by eliminating cost-sharing for abortion. However, people on high-deductible plans still face out-of-pocket costs for the full spectrum of pregnancy care. Now, we must go further and enact An Act Ensuring Access to Full Spectrum Pregnancy Care, which would require health insurance plans to cover all pregnancy care—including abortion, prenatal care, childbirth, miscarriage management, and postpartum care—without any kind of cost-sharing. Pregnant people should be the ones to dictate their own reproductive health care—not deductibles or insurance plans.

3. Protecting patients’ and providers’ digital privacy
   Every day, companies collect and sell sensitive personal location data from our cell phones, revealing where we work, live, seek medical care, and more. Anyone with a credit card can buy location information from data brokers — including anti-abortion extremists, politicians in restricted states, and other far-right groups across the country. As Donald Trump continues to threaten nationwide surveillance of pregnant people, our digital privacy is a serious reproductive equity issue. That’s why Reproductive Equity Now, along with our partners at the ACLU of Massachusetts, supports the Location Shield Act to prohibit the sale, lease, or trade of Massachusetts cell phone location data to protect patients and providers. 

“As we face a hostile presidential administration, now more than ever, state leaders must take decisive, creative, and nimble action to protect their constituents from anti-abortion attacks and cuts to health care access nationwide,” said Massachusetts State Director Lyv Norris. “Massachusetts has an opportunity and an obligation to serve as a firewall against anti-abortion extremism and as a beacon for reproductive equity in a second Trump term. This legislative agenda will be our roadmap for Massachusetts to continue and improve upon its legacy as a state that recognizes that access to the full spectrum of reproductive health care is a human right.”  

Click HERE to see additional Reproductive Equity Now supported legislation.

During the 2023-24 legislative session, the Massachusetts legislature took bold action to pass a maternal health care package that expanded access to midwifery care and eliminated barriers to the creation of free-standing birth centers. Last session, An Act Ensuring Access to Full Spectrum Pregnancy Care also received a favorable report from both the Joint Committee on Financial Services and the Joint Committee on Health Care Financing, which referred it to Senate Ways & Means.

In 2022, after the fall of Roe v. Wade, the Massachusetts Legislature passed an expansive reproductive health care package that included best-in-the-nation shield protections for patients and providers, a mandate to require insurance companies to cover abortion care, and an expansion of medication abortion care to Massachusetts public college and university campuses.

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