Senate Bill 8, or the Texas Fetal Heartbeat law, continues to make headlines after it was recently allowed to remain in effect by the US Supreme Court. A lesser-known bill, SB-4, took effect on December first.
The first part of the bill bans the mailing to Texas drugs used to induce an abortion.
Dr. Abigail Aiken, an associate professor at the UT School of Public Affairs says it would not be obvious from the packaging what the pills are.
"I think the idea of the bill is to create what I would call a chilling effect, to try to instill fear that are trying to help folks in Texas by mailing them abortion pills," Aiken said. "To know that there could be a punishment if you are found to be doing this."
She says women are going online and buying these pills, even though laws on the books in Texas already prohibit abortion providers from doing any kind of telemedicine.
She adds this law will also be hard to enforce.
"Short of going through people's mail, which is usually prohibited under federal law, I don't know how the state would enforce this because if you're getting abortion pills through the mail, it is not necessarily going to be obvious what those are," Aiken said.
The other part of the bill shortens the time a woman can be prescribed these pills from ten to seven weeks.
Aiken said: "That's really consequential when you think of the number of barriers and roadblocks that in the way of people trying to access abortion here in Texas."
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