They shared the worst moments of their lives in hopes of expanding abortion care in Mass.

This is perhaps as good a time as any — amid the last-minute flurry of legislative sausage-making on Beacon Hill — to reflect on how laws get changed.

Read more Goal-starved Revolution expected to acquire Leeds United winger Jack Harrison this week

It happens when ordinary citizens share their stories, and lawmakers actually listen. And it’s happening right now because women have recounted their traumatic experiences of traveling out of state to get an abortion because the current law prevents doctors in Massachusetts from deciding what’s best for their patients.

These are women who wanted nothing more than to deliver healthy babies, but after discoveringa devastating diagnosis in their final weeks of pregnancy, they couldn’t. How to handle that should be a decision made between patients and doctors. Instead it’s left to a state law that is anything but clear.

Yes,even Massachusetts, home to some of the strongest reproductive rights in the country, has more work to do. That might finally change with a bill that passed the House 119-33 this week and isnow before the Senate.

Change happens when patients speak up, the way Kate Dineen began to in 2022, telling of how she was refused abortion care when she was 33 weeks pregnant and an MRI found her unborn son had suffered a catastrophic stroke.Dineen and her husband drove to a clinic 500 miles away in Maryland so she could terminate her pregnancy, paying about $10,000 for the procedure, plus travel costs. Then she returned to Boston to endure 40 hours of labor to deliver her aborted fetus.

This is not easy, reliving some of your darkest, most vulnerable moments of your life. ButDineen telling her story helped the Legislature pass legislation to increase abortion access after 24 weeks of pregnancy.

And Dineen hasn’t stopped sharing her story, because the 2022 fix — which added “grave fetal diagnosis” to the statute — wasn’t enough. It had been a compromise, the bestpatients and advocates like Reproductive Equity Now could get. The law has helped, but according to REN, every year dozens of women in Massachusetts still make similar traumatic journeys out of state to terminate pregnancies those three words don’t quite cover.

Women like Nicole Martin who last year was 31 weeks pregnant when doctors at Boston Children’s Hospital discovered that her unborn son’s brain had stopped growing. He would never talk, walk, or eat on his own. But they could not terminate her pregnancy because they could not determine at the time if this counted as a “grave fetal diagnosis.”

So, Martin and her husband flew to a clinic in Washington, D.C., for an abortion she couldn’t get here. On the way back, she became so sick she was vomiting in an airport restroom stall.

“It was one of the worst days of our lives,” recalled Martin. “I never thought it would happen to me. I just want people to be able to access care close to home. It’s just so important when you’re going through a crisis like that to have your own doctors and family around you.”

Read more Patriots mailbag: Who will be the team’s most impactful rookie?

Stories like this have lent momentum to the new bill, which updates the statute by removing requirements such as a “grave fetal diagnosis” with language that simply says that ending a pregnancy after 24 weeks would be up to “the professional judgment of the physician.”

It’s being pushed by advocates like REN and lead sponsors — state Representatives Christine Barber and Lindsay Sabadosa and state Senator Robyn Kennedy. And the bill found champions in state Representative Marjorie Decker, the State House chair of the Joint Committee on Public Health, and House Ways and Means Chair Aaron Michlewitz.

Providers wanted this, too, which is why hospitals, including Beth Israel Lahey Health, Mass General Brigham, and UMass Memorial Health, endorsed this bill last week.

“We’re frequently dealing with situations of nuance, of gray areas,” said Dr. Deborah Bartz, an OB/GYN physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “Those exceptions frequently do not cover the patients that really need the coverage.”

There’s another reason why Dineen hasn’t stopped. The reproductive landscape has changed dramatically since 2022 when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade.

As more states restrict access to abortions, women from all over the country have turned to telehealth services in Massachusetts for abortion pills, which are generally prescribed only in the first trimester. The number of medical abortionsin Massachusetts doubled in 2024, climbing to 49,450 from 24,355 in 2023,according to state data, with most of the patients coming from out of Massachusetts.

“Given what’s happening across the country, we have a moral obligation to untie the hands of our world-class health care providers and let them care for patients here in the state,” said Dineen, who lives in Boston and is the CEO of business-backed advocacy group.“The fact that we’re still shutting doors on patients in need and sending them to clinics out of state is still a surprise to anyone I tell.”

In Massachusetts, of all places, it shouldn’t be. Nor should women like Dineen and Martin have to keep telling these stories about the worst days of their lives. It’s time for Beacon Hill to finish what it started four years ago, and make sure this state has the strongest reproductive rights in the country.

Read more The DNC may snub the N.H. primary once again — and make the same mistakes once again