Texas AG Arrests Midwives For Abortion. Do You Feel Safer Yet?
Texas's maternal death rate is up 33 percent since abortion banned in state.
The state of Texas, where abortion has been banned since 2021, has made its first abortion-related criminal arrest. Midwife Maria Margarita Rojas, 48, has been arrested for “providing illegal abortions and illegally operating a network of clinics in the Northwest Houston area” and charged with the illegal performance of an abortion and with practicing medicine without a license.
Which, you know, she wouldn’t have had to do in the first place if abortion were not illegal in the state.
Also arrested were Jose Manuel Cendan Ley, 29, who allegedly assisted Rojas “in at least one abortion” at her clinic in Waller, Texas, and nurse practitioner Rubildo Labanino Matos, 54, whose license was suspended by the state board and who was charged with conspiracy to practice medicine without a license.
Exactly zero patients were harmed in the commission of these “crimes,” whereas at least three women have died as a direct result of the state’s abortion ban.
According to court records, Rojas, assisted by Ley, twice attempted an abortion on a patient identified as E.G., and the state also accused her in its bail motion of having performed a separate abortion in Harris County earlier this year.
The charges faced by Rojas and Ley come with fines of $100,000 per abortion and up to 30 years in prison if they are found guilty. On Monday, a Waller County judge set their bond at $500,000 for the abortion charges and $200,000 for the medical license charges.
To celebrate Rojas’s arrest, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sent out a press release that reads like a Handmaid’s Tale flashback, in which he congratulates himself and the state for protecting women from this woman who was (allegedly) trying to save their damn lives.
“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 was quoted as saying in the press release announcing Rojas’s arrest. “Texas law protecting life is clear, and we will hold those who violate it accountable.”
This would be one thing if Rojas and the others were attacking pregnant women at random on the street with knitting needles and coathangers instead of providing them with the abortions they desperately want. Alas, Paxton and others like him have to ignore the fact that those who seek abortions actually want them, so that they can disingenuously and ridiculously claim to be protecting their lives.
Maternal deaths rose by 33 percent in the state from 2019 to 2024, even as they’ve decreased by 7.5 percent nationwide, and the sepsis rate in second-trimester miscarriage hospitalizations has risen by more than 50 percent since the ban went into effect, and Paxton has the gall to say that Rojas is “endangering the lives of women”? When at least three women have died as a direct result of the state’s abortion ban? Are you kidding me? And let’s not even get started on the lives destroyed by being forced to give birth against their will, because they matter as well.
As if that weren’t enough, Paxton’s office closed out the press release by noting that “Texas law holds abortion providers — not patients — criminally responsible for unlawful procedures,” even as Republicans in the state are trying to pass a bill that would charge those who have abortions with homicide.
It’s also fairly infuriating for Paxton to claim that the state of Texas cares so deeply about “protecting life” when it continually performs more executions than any other state in the United States, and when he is personally trying to get a man executed for a crime that did not even happen.
Paxton’s press releases for the other two arrests were equally spine-chilling, and even included an extra dash of xenophobia, noting that “Ley is a Cuban national who entered the U.S. illegally in 2022 and was later paroled under the open borders policies enacted by the lawless Biden Administration” (which, nota bene, did not actually exist outside of the feverish imaginations of people like Ken Paxton) and slyly noting that Rubildo Labanino Matos was returning from Cuba upon his arrest.
There’s something so deeply cruel in Paxton’s trying to flip the script and paint himself as some great protector of women — whom he clearly believes are not only too stupid to make the decision to have an abortion themselves, but too stupid to recognize full-on 1984-style rhetorical mindfucks when he deploys them, to see that he is infantilizing women and not “protecting” them.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
The fact that Ken Paxton is not spending the rest of his misbegotten life rotting in a jail cell is one of the smaller miscarriages of justice.
How did I KNOW she was going to be Hispanic???