A Texas midwife has been arrested over accusations that she performed abortions in defiance of the state’s near-total abortion ban, the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, announced on Monday.
Maria Margarita Rojas has been charged with the illegal performance of an abortion and with practicing medicine without a license, according to a press release from Paxton’s office. Under Texas law, the illegal performance of an abortion is considered a second-degree felony. If convicted, Rojas could face decades in prison.
Rojas’s arrest is believed to be the first criminal arrest under Texas’s abortion ban. Last year, Paxton’s office sued Dr Margaret Carpenter, a New York-based abortion provider, for allegedly mailing abortion pills to a Texan.
“In Texas, life is sacred. 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,” Paxton said in a statement accompanying the news of Rojas’s arrest. “Texas law protecting life is clear, and we will hold those who violate it accountable.”
In the years since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, enabling Texas and more than a dozen other states to ban almost all abortions, anti-abortion activists have grown increasingly fed up with the lack of prosecutions of abortion providers. In Texas, advocates have increasingly encouraged men whose partners have had abortions to strike back with legal action.
Rojas, 48, operated a network of three clinics in the Houston area, according to Paxton’s office. These clinics, his office said, “unlawfully employed unlicensed individuals who falsely presented themselves as licensed medical professionals to provide medical treatment”.
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Requests for comment from Rojas’s clinics were not immediately returned. However, Holly Shearman, a midwife who runs a birthing center where Rojas sometimes worked, told the Texas Tribune that she did not believe the allegations.
“I’ve known her for eight years and I’ve never heard her talk about anything like that,” said Shearman, who said Rojas is a devout Catholic who often works with Spanish-speaking, low-income individuals. “I just can’t picture Maria being involved in something like this.”
Midwives – in particular, midwives of color – have long been a target of US anti-abortion activism. 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.
