Massachusetts
Don’t mess with Mass.: How the state became a center of post-Dobbs resistance – The Boston Globe
Foster has made little effort to hide her efforts to circumvent restrictive laws passed in other states since the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade. She doesn’t need to: She is operating with the full support of Massachusetts government officials, and even has a former attorney general on call in case anyone challenges her. Which may explain why she has not received a single death threat, summons, or cease and desist letter.
“We are part of the formal Massachusetts health care system,” says Foster, whose affable and unpretentious manner offers little hint of a resume that includes a Rhodes Scholarship and degrees from Stanford University and Harvard Medical School. “There is an incredible kind of legitimacy that comes with that.”
The MAP, one of only four domestic services of its kind openly operating in the United States, is currently shipping abortion medications to all 50 states. And it is the only one designed to operate as a fully integrated part of a state health care system. It is just one example of the way Massachusetts is taking its defense of abortion rights national.
In the two years since the Dobbs v. Jackson decision Women’s Health decision, the national news has been dominated by stories documenting the transformation of states like Mississippi, Texas, and Missouri, which have pushed through a raft of new laws to ban or severely limit abortion. But Massachusetts has quietly undergone an equal and opposite metamorphosis, emerging as the legal, spiritual, and intellectual center of the post-Dobbs resistance, with Harvard legal scholars and state agencies filing amicus Supreme Court briefs, new think tanks documenting the changing situation on the ground, a state Legislature instructing college health centers to hand out abortion pills, a department of public health spending millions to support abortion access and security, and a governor and attorney general who have vowed to use their offices to fight back.
The state is currently sitting on a stockpile of more than 15,000 doses of the abortion drug mifepristone, ordered up by the governor in case the Supreme Court bans it, and is home to a new “Reproductive Justice Unit,” tasked by the attorney general with monitoring new legislation and antiabortion tactics bubbling up from red states and helping to coordinate policies to counter them.
“I will do everything I can to protect access to care here in Massachusetts, and help nationally to ensure that women have access to medicated abortions,” Governor Maura Healey told the Globe. “People should not underestimate the very serious threat that is posed to women’s health by this extremist agenda.”
The state’s current burst of activism began in 2020, even before the Dobbs decision, catalyzed by the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg and a growing awareness of what was coming. In December of that year, the Legislature passed laws strengthening state constitutional protections for abortion, lowering the age of required parental consent from 18 to 16, and allowing abortions after 24 weeks of pregnancy in cases of fatal fetal abnormalities.
After Dobbs came legislation requiring state universities to offer medicated abortions on campus. The state also passed a first of its kind “Shield Law,” engineered to protect local telehealth abortion providers like The MAP from out-of-state prosecution by categorizing all virtual encounters with patients in states that restrict abortion, or gender-affirming care, as local. These policies, along with the rise of telehealth as ready option for patients, have had a potent impact.
Since the 2022 Dobbs decision, the number of abortions in the state has risen 20 percent, from about 1,600 a month to an average of roughly 2,000 a month, according to Dr. Ushma Upadhyay, who co-chairs the Society for Family Planning’s WeCount project. Last year about 6 percent of those abortions were for people who came from out of state, double the percentage prior to Dobbs. The numbers are not nearly as high as those seen in “surge” states like New Mexico and Illinois, which border states where abortions have been severely restricted or banned. And they don’t include medicated abortions provided by those operating here under the Shield Law. The MAP’s numbers alone, which until recently weren’t officially categorized by DPH statisticians as occurring in state, would add another 500 abortions a month, or 25 percent, to the state totals.
Sitting behind a desk in her cramped office on the second floor of a co-working space, a tower of cardboard boxes containing abortion pills worth about $100,000 teetering atop a supply cabinet nearby, The MAP’s Foster predicts the numbers of abortion pills shipped from Massachusetts to other states would explode in the months ahead, as word spreads that safe, medical abortions are easily accessible through the internet.
Since 2022, six other states have followed the lead of Massachusetts and passed Shield Laws with similar language, including Washington, Colorado, Vermont, New York, California, and Maine. There are now four services operating in Shield Law states that ship abortion pills to states with abortion restrictions, according to Elisa Wells, co-director and cofounder of Plan C, a think tank and advocacy group established in 2015.
Supporting the efforts of Shield Law providers like The MAP, Governor Healey says, is in the state’s interest because it helps prevent local abortion providers from being overwhelmed by women from out of state. But it’s also, she believes, a question of doing what’s right. Leaving abortion policies up to states, she said, is dangerous.
“Forcing women who are the victims of rape or incest to carry a fetus to term is outrageous,” she said. “Forcing women who are dealing with complications from pregnancy that put themselves at risk and in danger of dying is outrageous. That’s where leaving it up to states has gotten us.”
Foster considers it a small miracle that she has not received a legal challenge of any kind, or even a single threatening letter, from one of those star-cluttered states on her map. She attributes that to a focus by abortion opponents on the US Supreme Court, which dealt the effort to limit access to medical abortion a significant setback on June 13, when it ruled the coalition of antiabortion groups who filed suit lacked standing to challenge the way the FDA is regulating the drug mifepristone.
The morning of the decision, Foster was ebullient, expressing her relief and making plans to pop a bottle of bubbly after work. Also apprehensive.
“We’re really, really proud of the care and of the service, but worried about what’s going to happen when we get cease and desist letters, when there are subpoenas, when there are lawsuits,” she said. “They’re coming, I’m sure.”
Abortion opponents say Foster is right to worry. Kyleen Wright, president of Texans for Life, called the actions of Shield Law providers like Foster “reckless” “dangerous,” and “so terribly wrong.” She accused supporters of medicated abortions of downplaying the risks and placing the lives of young women in jeopardy.
“If your doctors are in Massachusetts, and they’re surprised that we haven’t come after them, you might just tell them to hold onto their hats,” Wright told the Globe. “We are working on some more innovative and creative ways of putting a stop to this.”
Foster knows that if abortion opponents come after her, she’ll have plenty of powerful allies to defend her. Her first call will go to former state attorney general Martha Coakley, The MAP’s pro-bono legal counsel. She can also expect help from the AG’s Reproductive Justice Unit‚ which Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell established last fall. The unit, led by Sapna Khatri, a reproductive rights attorney, is helping coordinate the efforts of the attorney general’s more than 300 attorneys on a wide array of initiatives, and cases.
While she waits for the challenges to arrive, Foster and her colleagues are continuing to grow. Recently, a donor agreed to pony up $500,000 to build a free-standing pharmacy to fill more orders.
Foster came to her passion for safeguarding abortion rights early. A native of Portland, Ore.,, she grew up attending Planned Parenthood rallies with her mother and hearing horror stories from the pre-Roe v. Wade era. One of them involved her mother, who was impregnated by an abusive boyfriend at age 19 and had to travel to Mexico to obtain an abortion.
She has grown used to legally precarious circumstances.
In 2008, she cofounded a Cambridge-based nongovernmental organization to provide abortion access to women in the developing world; she cut her teeth flying to Bangladesh to make bulk purchases of misoprostol, a second drug often used to induce an abortion, and then carrying as many as 30,000 pills at a time into camps on the Thai border for distribution to refugees from Myanmar. She was prepared for the possibility of arrest and deportation. But she long ago decided that, in her line of work, the high stakes justify the risks. Most women who feel they need an abortion, she has learned, will do whatever is necessary to get one, even if that means taking extreme measures that put their health, even their own lives, in jeopardy.
“Somewhere between 8 and 15 percent of maternal mortality globally is directly attributable to unsafe abortions,” said Foster. “It is the cause of maternal mortality that is truly preventable.”
She and her collaborators launched The MAP on Sept. 28, 2023, International Safe Abortion Day, with four clinicians, a community outreach director, and a growing network of donors.
The prescribing process begins when a patient fills out a form online. They are then emailed a link to a questionnaire and consent forms and referred to a licensed clinician in Massachusetts, who determines if the patient is eligible. Then The MAP ships them the pills. Patients are asked to pay a minimum of $5. Though the providers and patients exchange phone numbers, texts, and emails in case there are questions, live interactions are not a requirement.
“It’s really profoundly unsettling to me to think that a girl that’s born today has less rights than her mother and grandmother,” Foster said. “That shouldn’t be allowed to take place just because a state has decided to restrict what was for almost 50 years considered a constitutional and fundamental right.”
Adam Piore can be reached at adam.piore@globe.com.
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Last Friday, my week in hacky sack mania ended just as abruptly as it began, in the office of the orthopedic surgeon who had replaced my left hip in January, staring down at my feet as I confessed that I may have done something kinda dumb.
But let’s start at the beginning, the previous Saturday, when I overheard my 16-year-old son telling my wife that all the kids at his school were obsessed with hacky sack.
“I’m sorry,” I interrupted. “Did you say hacky sack? As in, um, hacky sack?”
Yes, hacky sack, the footbag game that was a stoner favorite generations ago. It had become a mania in the week since they returned from April vacation, he informed me, and it was all over social media.
“I have a hacky sack around here somewhere,” I declared, a tad too excitedly, and was just getting ready to start boring him with stories about Gen X when he cut me off.
“Yes, it’s in my pocket,” he said. “They’re sold out everywhere, so I had to find yours.”
Wait? What is happening right now?
It gets weirder
First thing that Monday morning, I was having hilarious phone conversations with educators around the state, each of them as delighted and confused as I was, trying to figure out how, overnight, Massachusetts high schools had been overrun with “sack.”
On May 7, I published a story about the phenomenon, which seems to be mostly among boys. It may have stemmed from a couple TikTok videos that circulated before school vacation, then exploded when the students returned, and immediately birthed an entire social media ecosystem, with seemingly every school having a hacky sack “team,” and even an Instagram account putting out very unofficial “official MIAA hacky sack rankings.”
That day also happened to be my 50th birthday, and more surprising than the birthday party a bunch of friends threw me that night was that I would spend the party talking to all the other parents about hacky sack.
Soon, the trend spread out of New England, where the rebirth had begun, and other publications picked up on it. Who knew I’d stumbled upon a national scoop?
The ‘flying clipper’
Now let me bore you with Gen X stories, because we often lament that our kids don’t get to have the sort of childhoods we had, before social life moved online and into their pockets. And I can’t say any of us saw a hacky sack going into their pockets next to their phones, but it is hard to picture anything being more ideal for this moment. It’s unstructured play, it’s social, it’s accessible, and it doesn’t involve a damn screen.
And not to brag, but I was pretty decent when I would hack-in to a circle in my Tevas, so as I watched my kids fumble around like newborn giraffes in their first days as sackers, I couldn’t help myself. We passed around for a few moments, I was feeling it, and so like an idiot I did a move I haven’t done in 25 years where you jump up, raise one leg, and kick underneath it with the other (Google tells me this move is called a “flying clipper.”) I landed it perfectly as my kids said “I didn’t know you could do that!” and my body said “You can’t.”
Thankfully, after the X-rays came back, I was told the artificial hip looked fine, and I just had a mild case of something called “delusion.”
“Maybe leave the hacky sack to the kids,” the surgeon told me.
Gladly. I’m just amazed they want it.
🧩 5 Across: Slightly open | ☁️ 52° Weekend warming
‘Sold something that didn’t exist’: Hampshire College students and their parents are picking up the pieces in the wake of its closure news.
Local news? Why are millions of dollars flowing through a two-person Lexington news outlet? A look at the newsroom’s unorthodox business.
Crippling America: MIT warns that the nation is hurting its future by cutting research spending by 10 percent.
Gun smugglers: A group that bought dozens of weapons in New Hampshire and trafficked them into Canada using tribal reservation corridors has been toppled. US authorities said some of those weapons were used in violent crimes in Canada.
Transcending tragedy: ALS upended their young families’ lives. These two moms are spreading awareness, and joy.
Kissing the ring: What do Cabinet secretaries, UFC fighters, and baseball mascots have in common? They all paid homage to Trump in a single week.
Logan boat crash: You read that right. A 24-year-old Andover woman has been killed and three people injured in the late-night boat crash at a pier of the international airport.
The Wampanoag were right: Researchers find evidence of at least 15 early burials at Burying Hill in Bourne. (WCAI)
‘It’s an absolute total loss’: Moozy’s Ice Cream in Belmont has been destroyed in a three-alarm fire. Also, Downtown Crossing’s Scholars bar is closing, but a new place will take its place.
Red Sox: The greatest interim manager in baseball history says interim managers have a tough job. Says Joe Morgan: “Most of the time you’re taking over a lousy team.”
To save the middle class: Massachusetts wrote America’s first wage standard in 1912. “We are well placed to write the next one,” UMass Amherst economist Arindrajit Dube writes.
Susan Collins: Is the health of the Maine senator fair game in her Senate race? asks Joan Vennochi.
Public service: A trooper’s death reminds us of what public service really means, Kevin Cullen writes.
By David Beard
🎤 Guess who’s coming to town? Our summer arts guide points out the 80 best finds of the season, from Rosalia and a post-World Cup Shakira to an SNL reunion night, “The Sleeping Beauty,” and the art of Winslow Homer.
🎻 But wait, there’s more! Alec Baldwin will narrate “Lincoln Portrait” with the BSO at Tanglewood.
📺 What about this weekend? Our streaming picks include the thriller “The Lurker,” Colin Jost’s version of “Jeopardy,” and a HBO documentary with Sandra Oh, Kumail Nanjiani, and Bowen Yang.
🍕 Get out! The weather’s going to be great. Do you want sugar pizza? Or to kick back in your choice of beer gardens? Here are the week’s most notable restaurant openings around Boston.
🐶 Love is ruff: During this week’s Blind Date, “we talked a lot about her dog, Clementine, a sheepadoodle.” Plus, in Love Letters, will this college relationship make it through summer?
💤 Better sleep: Here’s an eight-second trick to get you back to sleep in the middle of the night. (Today)
⛰️ Mount Washington: This writer first ascended to the top of the wild, gusty New Hampshire peak at age 4 — and has kept coming back. Why? “The fragrant forest, chickadees, ice cold streams, and awe-inspiring vistas,” John Dodge writes.
Thanks for reading Starting Point. Have a great weekend!
This newsletter was edited by David Beard and produced by Ryan Orlecki. Today’s hacky sack soundtrack is Two Princes, by Spin Doctors.
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Billy Baker can be reached at billy.baker@globe.com. Follow him on Instagram @billy_baker.
Massachusetts
Trauma foam developed by Massachusetts company used to stop internal bleeding in first patient
A Waltham, Massachusetts, company began to develop a trauma foam to stop internal bleeding; years later, it saved an Alabama man’s life.
Ronald Farms remembers his car flipping upside down and then a white light in what can only be described as a near-death experience.
“There was this light that was so bright. It was literally a light from heaven. It was white, so bright, but it wasn’t blinding,” Farms said.
But when the 34-year-old regained consciousness, he was on his way to the University of Alabama at Birmingham Hospital (UAB) and suffering from severe abdominal bleeding.
“They told me I had a laceration to my kidney, a laceration to my liver. My spleen was completely ruptured. They had to remove that. Part of my colon was taken out,” Farms said.
When he got to the hospital, Farms says the trauma surgeon, Dr. Preston Hewgley, told his family that he had 20 minutes to live.
Within minutes, Hewgley decided to use a tool that had never before been administered in a patient, a futuristic foam to stop internal bleeding.
“There was a very intense moment of injecting the foam into Ronald’s abdomen that was palpable,” Hewgley told WBZ-TV.
UAB is the site of an FDA-approved clinical trial for ResQFoam, developed by Waltham biotechnology company Arsenal Medical. It is administered by cutting a small incision below the patient’s belly button and inserting what looks like a calking gun into the abdomen, then shooting foam, which expands inside the body cavity.
“It wraps around injured tissues and injured organs and puts pressure on them, which temporarily slows or stops hemorrhage,” said Dr. David King, a trauma surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital.
ResQFoam is the brainchild of King, who knows how deadly internal bleeding can be. He is a Colonel in the Army Reserve and has performed surgeries in combat.
“Intra-abdominal hemorrhage remains a leading preventable cause of death on the battlefield,” King said, “From the combat surgeon standpoint, it remains a very exciting horizon.”
The successful administration of the foam in Farms is a giant step forward for Arsenal Medical, but President and CEO Upma Sharma is cautiously optimistic with a clinical trial ongoing.
“We have a first safety cohort that we need to get through to demonstrate that the foam isn’t doing anything totally unexpected,” Sharma said.
Ronald Farms credits the foam with saving his life and he believes there is a higher reason why he is now sharing its story.
“I would highly, highly endorse it because it saved my life,” Farms said.
Could Massachusetts be in danger of becoming the nation’s first lawless society – where criminals roam the streets without fear of being imprisoned?
Shootings. Street takeovers. Open drug use. Urban terrorism. Road rage. Rampant shoplifting. It’s become acceptable behavior.
It’s a state where you can essentially get away with attempted murder.
The state’s all liberal political hierarchy has allowed it for years, and now it’s coming to fruition. Will Massachusetts be the first state in the country where laws don’t matter?
Scores of hardened, dangerous criminals are being paroled every year thanks to the Massachusetts Parole Board appointed by liberal Democrat Maura Healey.
Liberal judges are giving lenient sentences to violent offenders like the accused Memorial Drive shooter against the wishes of prosecutors.
When will voters say enough is enough?
The terrifying mass shooting on Memorial Drive only cemented the feeling of citizens that they could be targeted next. That could have been them running for their lives, cowering under their cars while a gunman with an assault rifle sprayed dozens of shots.
The alleged gunman shot at police multiple times back in 2020, and was charged with assault with intent to murder. The judge rejected the Suffolk District Attorney’s recommendation of 12 years and cut it in half, enraging prosecutors.
There’s no doubt the alleged shooter should not have been on the street this week. Two innocent people nearly lost their lives.
Maybe now the line has been crossed where people looking at the shooting think: That could have been me on Memorial Drive, running for my life.
The fear of crime is a powerful political factor that could now play a role in this year’s gubernatorial race.
Incumbent Healey has to answer for her pathetic Parole Board and any judges she’s appointed that also have the same liberal bent that’s been part of the problem.
Voters fed up with high profile crimes and shootings – along with the high cost of living – may be part of the reason that Healey’s job approval numbers are tanking and could give life to Republicans’ hopes of stealing back the Corner Office.
Healey’s numbers are particularly bad among men and independent voters, according to a new MassINC poll of 800 registered Bay State voters. The only politician faring worse than Healey is President Trump.
Meanwhile, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu keeps repeating her claim that Boston is the safest major city in the country, but it doesn’t appear that way.
Wu was just reelected overwhelmingly, but Healey might be in some trouble.
Maybe it’s now time that voters might start demanding accountability from their political leaders.
But no, let’s keep focusing on Trump and the Epstein files. That’s the real problem.
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