The Massachusetts sponsor, Representative Kay Khan, a Democrat from Newton, Mass., said her bill would not only help end the ”cycle of trauma and incarceration” but would also save the state approximately $1 million per year that could be used for services like housing.

But State Senator Julia Salazar, a Brooklyn Democrat who ran a successful insurgent campaign for office last year that included an endorsement of decriminalization, said that the “Nordic model” did not solve the problem of prostitution because it still made sex workers “complicit in illegal activity.”

“It still would not bring the industry to the surface,” she said.

Still, she added that she had been “very pleasantly surprised” by how rapidly decriminalization has elevated “in the public discourse” over the last year.

Despite some progress, legislative achievements around prostitution have often been meager. The Maine bill was declared dead in the State Senate in late May, and other recent efforts have also stalled: in 2017, for instance, the New Hampshire House of Representatives narrowly passed a bill establishing a legislative committee to study decriminalizing sex work, like the current proposal in Rhode Island. But the New Hampshire bill stalled in the State Senate amid strong opposition from Gov. Chris Sununu, a Republican.

The bill’s sponsor, Elizabeth Edwards, left office last year, but said she hopes that her former colleagues will continue to fight. “It seems like an area of policy where we could do way better,” she said.

“I wish the world knew that these are just people making money in a way that I think is a net societal benefit,” Ms. Edwards, a Democrat, added. “There are always going to be people that want sex. It’s a basic human drive. All you can do is make it safer.”

