BOSTON – Gov. Maura Healey on Thursday approved a new parentage law aimed at protecting families formed through paths like in-vitro fertilization and surrogacy.

“Our laws need to reflect the realities of modern families and the loving environments where children grow and flourish,” the governor said in a statement Friday. “This moment is a victory for all families in Massachusetts who deserve to be treated with dignity and to have their rights recognized and protected under the law.”

Arline Isaacson of the Massachusetts Gay and Lesbian Political Caucus said the law (H 4970) is “huge” in its importance to LGBTQ families.

“It is unquestionably the most important piece of legislation that has passed for LGBTQ families since we won the right to marry 20 years ago,” Isaacson told the News Service.

The law updates parentage statutes to account for parents who have children with the help of reproductive technologies. Every other New England state has made similar edits to its law books, according to Sen. Julian Cyr.

For families whose children arrived via IVF or surrogacy, “up until the passage of this law, we had to adopt our own children,” Isaacson said. The adoption process is expensive, she said, and “in many cases it feels humiliating because you’re having people investigate you, essentially, to see if you’re a good parent of your own children that you’ve already [had].”

Both the House and Senate passed the bipartisan bill unanimously this summer. It was based in part on a measure sponsored by Republican Rep. Hannah Kane, who said she wanted her daughter, who is lesbian, to be able to “experience the joy of being a parent some day, with the same rights to establish her parentage and the same legal protections as her dad and I did.”

The socially conservative Massachusetts Family Institute called the bill “alarming” and “harmful” in a legislative update on its website, while the Massachusetts Republican Party issued a press statement Aug. 2 taking aim at “misleading claims” about the bill’s text.

“It makes important technical changes to protect the legal fathers and mothers who build their families through adoption or surrogacy,” the state Republican Party said, adding that “similar versions of this law exist in nearly every state.”