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No it very manifestly is not.
We are watching mainstream Democrats pivot from "Don't be ridiculous that would never happen." to "Yes it's happening and that's a good thing." in the space of an election cycle.
I don’t find this framing to be especially persuasive since Massachusetts is apparently the 10th state to do it, and laws of the other similar states all pre-date the 2024 election. If the mainstream democratic position was “don’t be ridiculous, [passing such a law] would never happen” then they were factually wrong then, and nothing really changed in the space of an election cycle.
The steelman is that the mainstream democratic positions are actually “don’t be ridiculous, [the late-term elective abortions with zero medical reason] would never happen” and “Yes, it’s good we passed this law because it reduces the red-tape for late-term abortions for medical reasons”. These two positions are not internally contradictory.
For what it’s worth, I do not agree with this new law because I think it would actually lead to elective late-term abortions and I would prefer they kept the previous version, similar to California’s abortion laws.
Generally, from what I've seen the steelman is, "If a woman wanted to abort for purely elective reasons she would have done so earlier in the pregnancy. These laws just make doctors fear that if they perform an abortion for medical reasons (the baby or mother is extremely unlikely to survive) they'll be put on trial."
Which is one of those things that sounds plausible but not sure how true it is.
It bullshit, they have caught people going over gestational limits before. But going beyond that, most countries have gestational limits, and the idea that having them will put women in danger or make it hard for doctors makes no sense, given that fact.
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Ignoring that they could be put on trial for that more generally, of course. Everyone else has a reasonable fear that in a self-defense case this will occur anyway, and isn't that generally the justification the pro-abortion side trots out?
So the hospitals that pre-emptively prohibit the procedure are generally either just grandstanding (re: "Blues think they're the only bastion of civilization in a hostile country"), or are sunk into the tarpit of (Blue-style) extreme risk-aversion by banning the practice. Which they're incentivized to do, since this can give their side a few graves to stand on to enable the grandstanding, even though those deaths are ultimately caused by them and their power structure being insane people.
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Lying. They were lying. Ralph Northam, everyone that defended him, et cetera and so forth, all lying.
Hypocrisy is not the only offense in the world, and it's unenforceable against people who do not share one's own moral precepts.
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