"S.B. 8 explicitly excludes state officials from enforcing the law, which was designed to avoid having those officials named as defendants in challenges to the ban before it was ever used against a provider. The roughly six-week cutoff in the law is 18 weeks less than the standard set by Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that first enshrined a woman’s constitutional right to abortion. The court in that ruling said that states could not ban abortions in the first trimester of pregnancy, a period that was chosen because of the idea that a fetus typically could not survive outside the womb during that time."
Roe v. Wade

January 1, 1970