The abortion arrests have started
Texas is a fairly decent place to be an armadillo (they’re the official state small mammal) and an increasingly dire place to be a woman. In 2021, it implemented a near-total abortion ban: the most radical abortion law in the US. Now it’s going even further in its crusade to outlaw abortion. On Monday, the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, announced the first criminal charges under Texas’s abortion ban. Maria Margarita Rojas, a licensed midwife, was charged with the illegal performance of an abortion and with practicing medicine without a license, according to a press release from Paxton’s office. Her employee Jose Ley was also charged.
There are still a lot of details that are unclear or unverified when it comes to this case, which apparently caught officials’ eyes after an anonymous tip-off. But I’ll tell you what is glaringly apparent: Texas wants to make an example of Rojas. They want Rojas, who primarily served a low-income Spanish-speaking community, to be a cautionary tale. One that ensures people are too terrified to even think about helping a woman obtain an abortion.
Rojas isn’t getting some sort of slap on the wrist; the full force of the state is coming after her. She was reportedly pulled over by police at gunpoint while on her way to a clinic and the abortion charge is a second-degree felony, which comes with up to 20 years in prison. Meanwhile, according to the Texas Tribune, the state recommended Rojas and Ley each be held on a million-dollar bond. A million dollars! (In the end, a judge ordered their bonds each be set at $500,000 for the abortion-related charges and $200,000 for the medical license charges.) To put this in perspective, a Texas elementary school teacher arrested earlier this month after a “large quantity” of child sexual abuse materials was reportedly found on his devices, is being held in jail on a $75,000 bond.
Locking up doctors isn’t a popular policy platform – according to a 2024 KFF poll, eight in 10 Democrats, two-thirds of independents and about half of Republicans want to protect doctors who perform abortions from facing either fines or prison time. Which seems to be why Paxton went after a midwife. Mary Ziegler, a law professor and leading authority on the legal history of the American abortion debate, notes in Slate that “this is almost certainly not the first prosecution that Paxton could have brought”. No, it looks like Paxton was trying to find the perfect victim: someone he could easily smear.
“The fact that Rojas is not a physician is central to Paxton’s strategy,” Ziegler writes. “He claims that the prosecution will protect women from unlicensed and presumably unsafe providers … [he wants] to signal that midwives who provide abortions are unsafe, unqualified, and dishonest.” This attack on the credibility of midwives – particularly non-white midwives – isn’t new. The Guardian notes that: “As abortion bans spread across the country in the 19th century, midwives were often driven out of work or faced criminal consequences, which in turn led white, male doctors to siphon up their patients and dominate the medical field.”
Some observers believe that the timing of all this is also strategic. Abortion activist Jessica Valenti (who used to write this newsletter and now writes Abortion, Every Day) has noted that Rojas was arrested weeks ago. Why did Paxton wait until now to send out a press release? Valenti reckons he is trying to distract from the fact that Texas Republicans are trying to push through SB 2880, which she characterizes as the biggest piece of anti-abortion legislation since Roe was overturned. This bill targets Texans’ access to abortion pills and makes it easier to sue people and companies involved in a person’s medication abortion. The bill also protects “any person who impregnated the woman who used abortion-inducing drugs through conduct constituting sexual assault” from being sued.
“Flooding the zone” – a strategy put forward by Steve Bannon to describe the process of overwhelming the media by creating more news than anyone can possibly follow – is very much part of the Republican playbook. But, at this point, I don’t know whether anti-abortion activists really care about distracting us from all the dystopian schemes they’ve got up their sleeves. On the contrary, they seem eager to rub their cruelty in our faces. Still, amid the unceasing torrent of news, it is true that we must stay focused. We must remember that the arrest of Rojas and Ley isn’t some sort of one-off isolated to Texas but part of a much broader attack on reproductive rights. Don’t listen to Donald Trump’s “reassurances” that abortion rights should be left to the states to decide: the eventual goal is to end abortion access entirely.
Elon Musk’s dad says his son was friendly with their Black servants growing up
The Washington Post recently did a deep dive into why Elon has become obsessed with anti-DEI efforts. While Musk, who is busy dismantling the country, didn’t speak to the Post, his estranged dad, Errol (the one who has two children with his former stepdaughter), did send an email where he provided some information on Elon and his younger brother’s childhood. “We had several black servants who were their friends,” Errol noted in defence of his fascist-salute-enthusiast son. Can’t possibly be racist then.
Republican who introduced Trump derangement syndrome bill arrested for soliciting a minor
You can’t make this stuff up.
Gisèle Pelicot will publish a memoir
It’s called A Hymn to Life and it’ll be out next year.
The radical vision of Dona Ann McAdams – in pictures
“I was fascinated by how women presented themselves in public,” McAdams writes in a reflection accompanying one of the photos in this amazing collection. “Everyone knew about the male gaze, but the female gaze interested me more.”
after newsletter promotion
Israel has killed more than 200 children in Gaza in just a few days
A Unicef spokesperson told Al Jazeera that at least 200 children had been killed in Gaza since Israel shattered the ceasefire. Friday was Mother’s Day in the Middle East, making this even more harrowing. Meanwhile, everyone in Gaza is traumatized. Please watch this heartbreaking video from CNN where eight-year-old Sama Tubail, who has lost all her hair from stress, says: “I want to die and have my hair grow in paradise.” The UN has said “a generation has been traumatized”, and that nearly all of Gaza’s 1.2 million children need psychological support. If you’re American, your taxpayer dollars are funding this, your lawmakers are enabling this, large swathes of the media are justifying this, and you can lose your job for speaking up about this.
Ella Keidar Greenberg sentenced to 30 days in prison for refusing to join the Israeli army
Greenberg is a trans woman who has protested with Palestinian activists against land theft. She’s risking being sent to male military prison in order to stand against the genocide. An enormously brave woman – it’s a shame people like her aren’t getting more media attention.
US women’s justice group launches campaign to get Andrew Tate extradited
The group, UltraViolet, has criticized the Trump administration for reportedly pressuring Romanian officials to allow Tate to fly to Florida last month.
Iranian authorities have escalated their crackdown on women’s rights defenders
“Since International Women’s Day (IWD) on 8 March, the Iranian authorities have arbitrarily arrested at least five women’s rights activists,” Amnesty International reports. “These arrests come amid an intensified crackdown … In the lead up to IWD, the authorities flogged a male singer 74 times for performing a protest song against Iran’s discriminatory compulsory veiling laws and, in February 2025, sentenced a women’s rights activist to death.”
Bird research has a bro bias
You can’t even escape sexism when you’re a pigeon, apparently.
The week in pawtriarchy
Technically, the blobfish does not have any paws. (Nor does it have a swim bladder, a full skeleton, muscles or scales.) Still, it gets an honourable mention this week after being crowned New Zealand’s fish of the year. This is quite a result for the blobfish (which a spokesperson for the competition described as looking like “a failed medical experiment” when it’s out of the water), which was once voted the “world’s ugliest animal”. Another fun fact about the blobfish? They don’t have many bones, but still have more of a spine than the Democrats.
