Image: Texas Attorney General Paxton. Photo in Le Temps in 2023. © Eric Gay / keystone-sda.ch
A Texas midwife, who owns three clinics in that state, has been arrested and charged with “performing illegal abortions,” local authorities announced Monday. She is the first person to be criminally prosecuted in Texas, one of the states with the most restrictive anti-abortion laws, since the Supreme Court struck down the federal guarantee of abortion rights in 2022.
María Margarita Rojas, a 48-year-old midwife, was charged with “performing illegal abortions” in three Texas clinics she owns, as well as practising medicine without a license, and was taken into custody. She faces up to 20 years in prison.
In Texas, abortion is illegal even in cases of pregnancy resulting from rape or incest. There is only one exception: when the pregnant woman’s life is threatened, a criterion that is not precisely defined, according to abortion rights advocates, which can delay medical care even if it is necessary.
The press release announcing her arrest also noted the arrests of “unlicensed individuals who falsely presented themselves as licensed medical professionals to provide medical treatment” who worked in her clinics. Rojas, it states, performed illegal abortions in direct violation of the Texas Human Life Protection Act. The Attorney General also filed for a temporary restraining order to shut down the three clinics. The press release closes by stating that “Texas law holds abortion providers, not patients, criminally responsible for unlawful procedures”.
Paxton is quoted as saying: “I will always do everything in my power to protect the unborn, defend our state’s pro-life laws, and work to ensure that unlicensed individuals endangering the lives of women by performing illegal abortions are fully prosecuted.” However, the one thing Paxton will never do for the “unborn” is give birth to them and look after them for the rest of his life, let alone theirs. Hence, his fine self-congratulatory words could not be more empty.
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.”
The reality in relation to saving or not saving lives is that maternal deaths have surged in Texas since it enacted its abortion ban, according to an analysis published last month by ProPublica. Dozens more pregnant and post-partum patients died in Texas hospitals in 2022 and 2023, compared to before the pandemic. Sepsis rates likewise rose more than 50 percent among women who were hospitalized after losing their pregnancies in the second trimester. Experts attribute the increasing danger of being pregnant in Texas to doctors delaying or withholding treatment out of fear of running afoul of the state abortion ban, which only provides a narrow exception to save the life of a patient.
Instead of directly going after providers, Paxton has found other ways to carry out his anti-abortion crackdown. He sued the city of Austin last fall over its creation of a fund to help pregnant patients travel out of state to get abortions. He’s fighting to overturn 25-year-old HIPAA privacy rules shielding patient data from state investigators as well as recent regulations adding extra protections for abortion patients’ private health information. And, according to the Washington Post, last year Paxton’s office quietly launched an initiative to find cases to prosecute by collecting tips from the male sex partners of women who receive abortions.
Meanwhile, not to be outdone, the neighbouring state of Louisiana has passed a law classifying abortion pills as a dangerous substance, also a first in the United States. A 100% falsehood.
But if you really want to be depressed, read the Mother Jones article by Kiera Butler, entitled: “The anti-abortion movement is splintering” in the February 2025 edition. It’s not good news though…
SOURCES: Le Temps avec l’ATS, 18 March 2025 (in French); Press release by Ken Paxton, Attorney General of Texas: https://x.com/KenPaxtonTX/status/1901705532165280078/photo/1 ; Mother Jones, by Madison Pauly, March 2025.