Smiling proudly, the group of women surrounding Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey on Tuesday looked more like they were celebrating a birthday party than signing legislation. As Gov. Healey made her last pen stroke, the gaggle of women erupted in applause, some laughing cheerfully as if they had solved world hunger.

They were really witnessing the governor legalize abortion up till birth across Massachusetts.

The law Gov. Healey signed nullifies the state’s already flimsy pro-life protections, which technically banned abortion after 24 weeks gestation. Twenty-four weeks is already incredibly late into pregnancy. By just six weeks, unborn babies have a heartbeat. And by 15 weeks, they can feel pain.

What’s more, later abortions — anything past 20 weeks gestation — require incredibly invasive surgical procedures called “dilation and evacuation” abortions. These abortions “often include a gruesome process where the baby is fatally poisoned in the womb and then delivered dead. They can also involve an abortionist crushing and dismembering a baby before its delivery,” per a Daily Wire report. This involves excruciating pain for the unborn child. In fact, there are documented cases where unborn children have resisted and fought against the tools used to end their lives.

Yet Gov. Healey’s new law will ensure that babies as late as nine months into pregnancy — 40 weeks gestation — suffer this gruesome fate.

Massachusetts was already one of the most hostile states toward life even before Gov. Healey signed her death bill. Though the state law restricted abortion after 24 weeks, it made exceptions for the life and “health” of the mother, the inclusion of the term “health” meaning that women could easily procure far later abortions if the state’s pro-abortion medical professionals deemed it was “necessary.”

Not only that, but a few years ago, I travelled to the Massachusetts State House to join other pro-life advocates and leaders in protest against Gov. Healey’s attempts to shut down pregnancy centers across the state.

Gov. Healey had launched a $1 million campaign to smear pregnancy centers for offering women and children necessary resources such as diapers, baby clothes, career and educational assistance, housing, and so much more.

The reason for her opposition? Merely that pregnancy centers in the state were giving women the means to avoid abortions that many of them do not want and are only choosing out of desperation.

In fact, studies have found that almost 70% of women with a history of abortion believe their abortions contradicted their values and preferences, and many women say they were coerced into unwanted abortions. Organizations such as the pregnancy centers across Massachusetts exist to provide such women with an alternative. They have transformed countless lives and are supported by 84% of all Americans.

In response to Gov. Healey’s senseless attack on the centers giving Massachusetts women real options, dozens of women and children who benefited from Massachusetts pregnancy centers showed up at the State House in protest.

Gov. Healey has continued antagonizing them anyway. Funny how the women who claim to “champion” other women are often the nastiest towards their own sex.

Massachusetts Citizens for Life President Myrna Maloney Flynn, who spearheaded the protest against Gov. Healey’s smear campaign a few years ago, condemned this new law as a devastating blow for women and children.

“Legalizing election abortion up to birth on healthy mothers and healthy, pain-capable unborn children is not about protecting the doctor-patient relationship,” she said. “It is about abortionists normalizing the deaths of fully-developed infants and pressuring vulnerable women to permit their unborn children to die in heinous acts of violence.”

Gov. Healey may have gotten her applause this week. But history won’t remember this as a triumph for women. It will be remembered as the day that Massachusetts stopped pretending to protect the vulnerable at all.