Texas has charged a Houston-area midwife with performing illegal abortions in defiance of the state’s near-total ban, state Attorney General Ken Paxton announced on Monday. The case is believed to be the first time since the overturn of Roe v. Wade that someone has been arrested for allegedly providing abortion care.
Maria Margarita Rojas, who operates a network of low-cost health clinics, and her employee Jose Ley face charges of illegal performance of an abortion — a second-degree felony — and practicing medicine without a license. If found guilty, they could face up to 20 years in prison. On Tuesday, Paxton announced the arrest of a third person in connection with the case: Rubildo Labanino Matos, a nurse practitioner whose license is under probation and who has been charged with conspiracy to practice medicine without a license. The attorney general’s office said the investigation remains ongoing. Court records show Rojas was first arrested on March 6 in Waller County, charged with practicing medicine without a license, and released on a $10,000 bond. On Monday, Rojas was arrested again alongside Ley and hit with the felony charges. Their bond was set at a combined $2.1 million. Paxton also said he filed a temporary restraining order to shut down Rojas’s clinics.
State records show that Rojas has been a certified midwife since 2018 and her state license is set to expire in 2026. According to court records reviewed by the Houston Chronicle, an anonymous tipster contacted the Texas Health and Human Services Commission on January 17 to file a complaint against Clinica Waller LatinoAmerica, which Rojas owns. The tipster said the clinic was offering illegal abortions. In a follow-up email six days later, the tipster named two patients who had allegedly terminated their pregnancies. “I know that this been occurring for a long time about the facility and I know that in Texas abortions [should] not be performed,” the tipster said. “Both abortions were not for any medical complication; they were both made for irresponsibility of not wanting to protect themselves using birth control.”
The Texas Tribune reported that the two patients are identified in court records as K.P., who allegedly terminated her pregnancy at three months in September 2023, and D.V., who allegedly had an abortion in January at eight weeks. Following the tip, Paxton’s office and the Harris County Sheriff’s Office began surveilling Rojas’s clinics and identified a patient — named E.G. in court records — leaving the premises after a procedure, according to the Tribune.
Court records say that in late February, the woman identified as D.V. confirmed to investigators that she had an abortion and identified Rojas as the provider, the Tribune says. The case was referred to Paxton by Waller County district attorney Sean Whittmore, a Republican, “to see that this case is handled with all of the resources necessary to see that justice is done,” Whittmore said in a statement. On March 5, Paxton’s office secured arrest and search warrants for Rojas, Ley, and Labanino Matos on charges of practicing medicine without a license, according to the Tribune. Investigators say they found misoprostol at the clinic — the ulcer drug that’s also used for a wide range of gynecological care, including abortions.
According to the affidavit reviewed by the Tribune, E.G. told investigators that she found herself pregnant after having delivered twins via C-section six months earlier, and sought care at Rojas’s clinic on the advice of her doctor. E.G. says Rojas, who staff allegedly referred to as a gynecologist, told her that she was four weeks pregnant but that her lab results showed there was only a 9 percent chance of a successful pregnancy. (While Rojas is not a certified OB/GYN in Texas, she was in her native Peru, the New York Times reported.) E.G. alleges Rojas said that was insufficient to continue the pregnancy and provided her a pill to take orally, while Ley gave her an IV and an iron injection. E.G. returned to the clinic the next day, after not experiencing any bleeding, to receive a second dose of what she later learned was misoprostol.
Texas currently bans abortion in all cases, except in instances of narrowly defined medical emergencies. Health providers who are found in violation of the law could face life in prison, in addition to a civil penalty of no less than $100,000. Last year, the state Supreme Court refused to clarify the scope of the ban’s exceptions, ruling against more than 20 women who were denied medically necessary abortion care. Though the law exempts abortion seekers themselves from prosecution, that hasn’t stopped overzealous prosecutors from attempting to charge patients themselves in the past.
There are still a lot of unknowns in the case against Rojas, says Marc Hearron, interim associate director of U.S. litigation at the Center for Reproductive Rights, which represented Kate Cox as well as the plaintiffs seeking to clarify the state’s exceptions in Zurawski v. Texas. “The thing about the ban’s criminal penalty is, it makes it a first-degree felony if the abortion was successful,” he says. “But the press release here says that she was charged with the illegal performance of an abortion, a second-degree felony, so it’s not clear why she would have been charged with that. Additionally, she’s also charged with practicing medicine without a license, which is not an abortion-specific law.”
But what’s clear, Hearron says, is that Paxton, a staunch anti-abortion Republican, is escalating his attacks and sowing fear among health providers. The charges against Rojas and Ley come just a few months after Paxton filed a civil lawsuit against a New York–based doctor for allegedly prescribing and sending abortion pills to a patient in the Dallas suburbs. When Cox sued Texas to seek permission to terminate her unviable pregnancy in 2023, Paxton threatened to prosecute anyone who helped her, even after a lower court issued a temporary restraining order so she could proceed with her abortion. And when the Biden administration said the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, a federal law better known as EMTALA, applied to emergency abortion care, Paxton sued the administration — signaling that the state of Texas would rather let patients die than allow them to terminate unviable pregnancies.
“The doctors all across the state are saying that they are afraid that their judgment is going to be second-guessed, and all of these actions show that Paxton is chomping at the bit to go after anybody who provides an abortion,” Hearron says. “It’s just a litany of situations where it shows the state of Texas does not care about women’s lives. What it cares about is stopping women from getting the care that they need, no matter what.”
In the United States, there’s a long history of midwives in particular being targeted for offering all sorts of reproductive health care, says Farah Diaz-Tello, senior counsel and legal director at the reproductive-justice legal nonprofit If/When/How. That Rojas’s clinics seem to have offered care to low-income and Spanish-speaking clients was not lost on her; Diaz-Tello believes Rojas’s arrest could lead to a chilling effect among patients who are already struggling with accessing affordable health care in Texas.
“I can only imagine the fear and uncertainty that people who’ve received care might be feeling right now, knowing that the provider or the clinic that helped them is being subject to criminalization,” she says. “People might be worried whether they can be criminally prosecuted, whether their private health information is now going to be used as part of the criminal prosecution against the provider.”
Given Texas’s track record as an anti-abortion state and Paxton’s zealousness, the attacks aren’t likely to stop at providers in the near-future, warned Kimberly Mutcherson, a professor at Rutgers Law School who specializes in reproductive justice, bioethics, and family and health law. Earlier this year, a Republican state lawmaker introduced a bill that would criminalize self-managed abortions by reclassifying terminating a pregnancy as homicide. (Similar bills have cropped up in at least six other states.)
“The next line of attack that we’re gonna see is women being prosecuted for their own abortion, whether it’s self-managed abortion or if they go out of state,” Mutcherson says. “We’re at the tip of the iceberg, and it’s only gonna get worse from here.”
The Cut offers an online tool you can use to search by Zip Code for professional providers, including clinics, hospitals, and independent OB/GYNs, as well as for abortion funds, transportation options, and information for remote resources like receiving the abortion pill by mail. For legal guidance, contact Repro Legal Helpline at 844-868-2812 or the Abortion Defense Network.