A bill easing access to late-term abortion in Massachusetts passed in the state House of Representatives on Wednesday. The Senate is expected to vote on the measure before the legislative session ends next week.

If the bill becomes law, Massachusetts would be among the states with the fewest restrictions on abortions late in pregnancy.

Current state law limits abortion after 24 weeks of pregnancy, with several exceptions that advocates have said are not enough to ensure that all women in need of abortion care can get it without leaving the state. Those exceptions allow late-term abortions if the life of the pregnant woman is in danger, if her physical or mental health is at risk, if there is a “lethal fetal anomaly” or if there is a “grave fetal diagnosis.”

The new bill would allow an abortion after 24 weeks if a doctor deemed it appropriate.

“We found that this care is so complicated, there is no way to encompass every possible exception,” said Representative Christine Barber, a Democrat who sponsored the legislation. “It should be between a doctor and a patient.”

Massachusetts has a Democratic governor and a Democrat-controlled legislature.

The House approved the bill in a 119-33 vote. For it to become law, the Senate must approve it before the current legislative session ends on July 31. A spokeswoman for Gov. Maura Healey did not immediately respond when asked on Wednesday if she would sign it into law.

Massachusetts Citizens for Life, an anti-abortion group, said in a statement that while the bill’s sponsors had “good intentions,” the bill raised serious concerns.

“Women experiencing unimaginable, heart wrenching pregnancy complications absolutely deserve all the support they need, but that support is not what this bill provides,” the group’s president, Myrna Maloney Flynn, said in the statement. “Instead, this bill ensures increased abortion industry profits and taxpayer-funded late-term procedures.”

Abortion laws around the country have evolved significantly since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. Some states have added new restrictions or banned abortion in almost all circumstances, while others, including Massachusetts, have sought to protect it by enshrining the right to abortion in state statute and tweaking language to widen access to it.

Abortion is broadly legal in 30 states and Washington, D.C.; 13 states have largely banned the procedure since the Supreme Court ruling in 2022, and six others have enacted limits on it between 6 and 12 weeks of pregnancy, according to KFF. a health care research group.

In Massachusetts, legislators updated the law in 2020, and again in 2022, when they added an exception to the 24-week limit for cases involving a “grave fetal diagnosis.” Yet advocates for abortion said that roadblocks persisted in cases where the legal language defining the exceptions could be interpreted in different ways.

In one case from 2021, a pregnant woman whose baby suffered a stroke in utero at 33 weeks was unable to obtain abortion care, despite the exceptions in the law, said Claire Teylouni, interim co-executive director of Reproductive Equity Now, a New England advocacy group.

“She was shocked that she had to leave Massachusetts to get this care,” Ms. Teylouni said. “Providers say they want to be able to use their professional expertise to make decisions — that’s how we treat almost every other area of health care.”

The new legislation proposed in Massachusetts, allowing late-term abortions at a doctor’s discretion, is similar to a law passed in Maine in 2023.

The bill is backed by the Massachusetts Health and Hospital Association, the Massachusetts Medical Society, the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of Massachusetts.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy group, 23,340 abortions were provided by clinicians in Massachusetts in 2025, a slight increase of 1.2 percent from 2024.