Since last week, prescribing abortion pills online or mailing them to recipients in Texas are actions that could result in jail time and fines up to $10,000.
These new bans are part of Senate Bill 4, which The Lily reported went into effect Dec. 2. The legislation also blocks health care providers from prescribing abortion-inducing medication to people who are seven weeks into their pregnancy or more. According to U.S. Food and Drug Administration guidelines the medication can be taken as late as 10 weeks into pregnancy.
“Today is a celebration. It’s a celebration of Texas values,” said Texas Gov. Greg Abbott during a ceremonial signing of Senate Bill 4 on Sept. 24, according to the Texas Tribune.
With the law, Abbott and other conservative lawmakers in the state hope to regulate self-managed abortions, which are difficult to monitor.
“This bill is an attempt to try to impede that practice by creating a chilling effect,” said Abigail Aiken, an associate professor of public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin who researches self-managed abortions. “It’s a concerted attempt to ban or restrict abortion in as many ways possible.”
In-person abortion care has become harder to access in areas with few clinics, so abortion rights activists have supported medication abortion as a safe option for those seeking to manage their own abortions. However, criminalization of self-managed abortions has occurred as recently as 2015.
Since medication abortion was first approved by the FDA 21 years ago, it increased from 6 percent of all nonhospital abortions in the first six months of 2001 to 31 percent in 2014, said the Guttmacher Institute, a Pro-Choice research organization.
Generally, medication abortion patients take doses of mifepristone and misoprostol 48 hours apart. Although the FDA currently requires mifepristone to be given under the supervision of a “certified prescriber” in a clinic, medical office or hospital, the restriction was eased during the pandemic.
The American College of Gynecologists and Obstetricians, and other groups have pushed back on the restriction and believe the rule is not based in medical evidence or need, said The Lily.
While President Joe Biden’s administration announced this year that it might ease federal guidelines regarding the dispensing of abortion medication, some states, including Texas and Mississippi, have ramped up the severity of their anti-abortion legislation.
Weeks before Abbott signed the new abortion pill regulations into law, a near-total abortion ban went into effect in the state. That bill bans most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.
Though other attempts to pass similar legislation have failed, the Supreme Court has so far refused to block it. The conservative-leaning court is still considering the matter, said The Lily.
According to The New York Times, the law may be hard to challenge legally due to the way it is written.
Additionally, the Supreme Court is expected to decide this summer whether to allow Mississippi to have a 15-week abortion ban. If they do allow the ban to stand, it could undermine the 1973 Roe vs. Wade ruling that allows abortions until fetal viability, around 24 weeks into pregnancy.
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