From Mother Jones.
In what appears to be the first arrests of healthcare providers for allegedly violating a post-Roe v. Wade state abortion ban, Maria Margarita Rojas, a midwife working in the region around Houston, and her employee, medical assistant Jose Manuel Cendan Ley, were taken into custody by Texas authorities on Monday.
Court records from Waller County, west of Houston, show that law enforcement initially accused Rojas with practicing medicine without a license, but on Monday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced that he was adding the illegal performance of an abortion to her indictment—a second-degree felony in Texas, carrying a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. Ley is facing the same charges.
The New York Times reports that court documents allege that Rojas “attempted an abortion” on a woman on two occasions in March and was “known by law enforcement to have performed an abortion” on another patient this year. In his press release, Paxton claimed that Rojas ran a network of clinics in towns around Houston that “unlawfully employed unlicensed individuals who falsely presented themselves as licensed medical professionals.” The website for the network, Clinicás Latinoamericanas, advertises urgent care services, treatment for chronic illness, and dietary counseling to a Spanish-language community. Paxton’s office said it had filed for a temporary restraining order to shut down the clinics.
On Tuesday, Paxton announced that a third person associated with the clinics, nurse practitioner Rubildo Labanino Matos, whose license is currently on probation, was arrested on March 8 and charged with conspiracy to practice medicine without a license.
[…]
The case against Rojas appears to represent the first time a healthcare provider has been arrested and jailed on charges of providing an illegal abortion. A website for a birthing center linked to Clinicás Latinoamericanas says Rojas was born in Peru, received her Texas midwife certification in 2018, and has attended “over 700 births in community-based and hospital settings.” The birthing center opened the same year Rojas got her license. Its website describes the center as focusing “on providing comprehensive care to pregnant woman and their families…Women here are treated with love and respect, empowering them to fulfilling their desire for a natural childbirth.”
Rojas’ friend and fellow midwife, Holly Shearman, reacted to the charges with shock, the New York Times reported. “They’re saying that she did abortions or something?” Shearman told the Times. “She never ever talked about anything like that, and she’s very Catholic. I just don’t believe the charges.”
According to Bloomberg, Rojas’ bail has been set at $1.4 million, and Ley’s at $700,000.
See here for the background. Here’s more from Slate.
Paxton likely picked Rojas for a reason: not just to send the message that “every life is sacred,” as Paxton told the press, but also to signal that midwives who provide abortions are unsafe, unqualified, and dishonest. Paxton’s strategy fits into a pattern of pre-Roe prosecutions, all while concealing the ways in which the criminal law related to abortion has become far harsher than it was before 1973.
Few details about Rojas’ case are publicly available, but Paxton arrested her and a staff member, alleging that they worked in four clinics across Texas’ Waller County. According to Paxton, Rojas and her colleague provided illegal abortions and falsely held themselves out as licensed medical professionals. (Rojas herself has been a licensed midwife since 2018, but Paxton appears to allege that she identified as a physician.)
The fact that Rojas is not a physician is central to Paxton’s strategy: He claims that the prosecution will protect women from unlicensed and presumably unsafe providers. His office seems to be hearkening back to horror stories like that of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, who was convicted of murder in 2013, and was accused of killing viable infants who were born alive, illegally dispensing opioids, and killing several patients. To date, Paxton hasn’t laid out evidence that Rojas harmed her patients beyond employing unlicensed staff.
And not all providers faced equal consequences. As historian Alicia Gutierrez-Romine has shown in her study of abortion in California, licensed physicians, who were more likely to be male and white, were less likely to face prosecution—or to face prison time if they were criminally charged. The same wasn’t true of midwives or physicians of color. Prioritizing the prosecution of a midwife like Rojas doesn’t seem like anything new.
The law in many states reinforced prosecutors’ tendency to single out some providers. State statutes included an exception for the life of the patient, which could apply either when patients intended to terminate a pregnancy or when someone required care after a miscarriage or stillbirth. Often, states exempted physicians from prosecution if they acted in good faith to protect the life or health of their patients. That wasn’t true for midwives like Rojas. Criminal laws, after all, had been designed by physicians and preserved their prerogatives. It was also easier to target midwives, who had less financial pull or political power. And in any case, prosecutors were more likely to act when a provider hurt women or seemed likely to. For decades, as historian Leslie Reagan has shown, prosecutors primarily went forward in abortion cases when a provider inadvertently killed a patient.
Paxton seems to be reading from a similar playbook, suggesting that his office is protecting women, and stressing that neither Rojas nor her employees were licensed physicians. Of course, as far as we know, he isn’t arguing that Rojas killed any patients, or endangered anyone, beyond allegedly holding herself or her employees out as possessing credentials they lacked.
If Paxton’s move in some way reflects past practice, Texas’ law and others like it are generally more punitive than what came before. Texas laws, for example, prescribe penalties far harsher than anything typical before 1973, including penalties of $100,000 per abortion and sentences up to life.
Besides, the deference to licensed physicians that defined the old regime is gone. Texas law requires doctors who intervene to protect a patient to show that their actions were objectively reasonable; good faith isn’t enough. That increases the risk for any provider addressing an emergency: The experts the state will tap to determine whether a procedure is reasonable could well come from organizations like the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which maintains that abortion is never medically necessary, and which has sent a member to the state’s Maternal Mortality Board.
There’s more from Daily Kos, the Texas Signal, the Houston Press, and Jessica Valenti. Again, we don’t know very much right now, and most of what we do know has come from either Paxton or the police, and neither should be taken as credible. At some point we will see the actual charges and we will hear from the defense attorneys, and then we can begin to draw some conclusions. Assume bad faith and bad motives by Paxton, and you won’t go wrong.
UPDATE: Here’s some new reporting from the Chron.
An anonymous one-sentence complaint submitted to the Texas Health and Human Services Commission in January started the investigation into a Texas midwife and her assistant who this week became the first person charged with performing illegal abortions under the state’s ban on the procedure.
“Hello. I wanted to file a complaint of a clinic in Texas that is offering abortions,” the tipster wrote on Jan. 17. “I know 1 person that they charge 1,300 for the abortion and as of right now [redacted] is there to get an abortion as well.”
The tip gave the clinic’s address as a 40750 Bus US-290 in Waller, the location of the Clinica Waller LatinoAmerica, a business the Texas Attorney General’s Office said is owned by Maria Margarita Rojas.
[…]
On Monday, the AG’s office also asked for a restraining order against Rojas’ four clinics – located in Waller, Cypress, Spring and Hempstead. In a petition seeking the order, lawyers for the AG’s office said the clinics were illegal operations that placed “the lives of unborn children and their mothers at risk.”
The petition, however, provides little detail about how state authorities investigated Rojas. The only evidence the petition cites is the one-sentence email the health commission received on Jan 17, and a slightly longer follow-up email the agency received on Jan. 23.
In the second email, the tipster appears to name two patients whose names are redacted in court filings.
The tipster wrote that one person sought an abortion in September 2024, when she was 3 months pregnant. Another woman sought an abortion in January, when she was 8 weeks pregnant, the tipster wrote.
“I know that this been occurring for a long time about the facility and I know that in Texas abortions [should] not be performed,” the email read. “Both abortion were not for any medical complication they were both made for irresponsibility of not wanting to protect themselves using birth control.”
It’s unclear from the filing if state investigators identified the tipster, who consented for the tip to be sent to other agencies.
Not a whole lot to go on there, and I don’t want to speculate ahead of the evidence. As I said, we’ll know more soon enough. This story notes that as of time of reporting, no restraining order against Rojas’ clinics had been issued.
Just keep in mind, Republicans use lies, lies and more lies to justify everything they do these days in order to obscure their real motives.