For several months, state investigators in Texas staked out clinics, interviewed witnesses and dove through dumpsters to look for evidence. Why, you may ask, did the government pour time and money into an extensive surveillance operation based on an anonymous tip? To arrest a midwife for providing reproductive health care.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced the arrest of Maria Margarita Rojas on March 17. The Houston-area midwife faces up to 20 years in prison for allegedly performing illegal abortions — a second-degree felony — and practicing medicine without a license. The chilling announcement marks Texas’s first criminal case against a health care provider since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022. Two of Rojas’s employees, Jose Ley and Rubildo Matos, were also arrested.
Before her arrest, Rojas ran Clínicas Latinoamericanas, a group of low-cost health clinics primarily serving northwest Houston’s Spanish-speaking community. Three facilities were effectively shut down on March 20, when a judge granted a temporary restraining order filed by Paxton’s office. Patients seeking affordable, necessary health care such as ultrasounds, vaccinations and medical exams for immigration procedures will now have to look elsewhere for services.
“It is no accident that Paxton would target a minority community already demonized in the right’s anti-immigrant discourse,” Natasha Lennard noted in The Intercept. Texas’s abortion ban is one of the most restrictive in the country, with no exceptions for rape or incest, but the draconian policy is wildly unpopular: In a 2022 survey conducted by the University of Texas at Austin, 78 percent of Texas voters said that abortion should be legal in some form. Notably, that was the public sentiment even before the Supreme Court overturned Roe and the wide-reaching harms of Texas’s abortion ban could be fully felt.
Now, with Donald Trump in office, it seems the far-right is looking to send a chilling message. What better expression of Christonationalist state power than to escalate the crackdown on abortion seekers?
Writing in her newsletter Abortion, Every Day, Jessica Valenti called Paxton “a political operator who picks cases strategically” and noted that he “likely chose Rojas because he believes Americans won’t find her sympathetic — whether due to racism, classism, or the stories his office plans to spin.” Indeed, Paxton’s office has already begun attempting to villainize Rojas and her associates; as Valenti notes, it’s important to remember that we should meet each of the state’s claims with extreme skepticism.
Paxton’s office, for instance, chose to highlight in a press release that Ley entered the United States from Cuba without documents in 2022. The release does not clarify that Ley later received a green card, but it does falsely claim that it was the Biden administration’s nonexistent “open borders policies” that later led to Ley’s parole. The state’s emphasis on Rojas allegedly operating “without a license” also obscures the fact that she has been a licensed midwife since 2018. A fellow midwife told the New York Times that Rojas had been an obstetrician in Peru before she came to the United States.
Perhaps knowing that Texas’s war on abortion is so unpopular, Paxton’s office also made a point to clarify in a press release that “Texas law holds abortion providers — not patients — criminally responsible for unlawful procedures.” But it is, of course, the patients who will suffer some of the greatest harms from the state’s incursion on bodily autonomy.
Take the case of Kate Cox, for instance: a 31-year-old mother of two who sued to access emergency abortion care in Texas after receiving a lethal fetal diagnosis from her doctor. Texas’s abortion ban contains a narrow exception for cases in which the pregnant person risks death or “substantial impairment of a major bodily function,” but this provision is nebulously defined. After a court ruled in Cox’s favor in 2023, Paxton stepped in to personally threaten medical providers with prosecution if they provided Cox with life-saving care. She finally obtained her abortion by leaving the state.
A ProPublica analysis found that, after Texas banned abortion at five weeks of pregnancy in 2021, the rate of sepsis increased by more than 50 percent for women hospitalized when they lost their pregnancies in the second trimester. Another study revealed maternal mortality shot up to 56 percent in Texas from 2019 to 2022 — much higher than the national increase of 11 percent — with Black women experiencing the largest spike. And a 2021 Tulane University review of national data found that, across the U.S., maternal mortality rates were higher in states with the most restrictive abortion policies. The U.S. already has a significantly higher maternal mortality rate than other rich nations. Low-income people of color, such as the patients served by Clínicas Latinoamericanas, are especially at risk for pregnancy complications.
This makes the attack on Rojas, Ley and Matos all the more despicable, as the attorney general’s office seeks to paint itself as a steward of women’s health.
“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.
But Rojas does not face charges for endangering or harming her patients. In fact, the anonymous tip that led to Texas’s investigation came from someone who claimed that a Clínicas Latinoamericanas facility was performing abortions “for some side money.” According to the Texas Tribune, the tipster claimed to know of two patients who had received abortions and suggested they had acted irresponsibly by “not wanting to protect themselves using birth control” — an allegation that bears the markings of classic anti-abortion misogyny.
Texas’s arrest of Rojas is clearly about social control, not patient safety. To fight against the state’s abortion crackdown, we must recognize how the assault on reproductive rights and anti-immigrant policy are connected — and refuse to entertain the lies of the Christonationalists in power.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today during our fundraiser. We have 48 hours to add 230 new monthly donors. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.