Eight people linked to a Texas midwife accused of performing illegal abortions have been arrested, Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, announced on Wednesday.
The midwife, Maria Rojas, earlier this year became the first person to be charged under Texas laws that outlaw virtually all abortions. She is now facing three counts of performing an abortion and 12 counts of practicing medicine without a license. The new arrests were all of people indicted for practicing medicine without a license under Rojas, who operated three clinics in the Houston area, according to Paxton’s office.
Paxton, a Republican who is now running for Senate, called the individuals “a cabal of abortion-loving radicals” and “fake doctors” in a press release.
“Those responsible will be held accountable,” he said. “I will always protect innocent life and use every tool to enforce Texas’s pro-life laws.”
The Center for Reproductive Rights, which has represented Rojas in court, did not immediately reply to a request for comment. But in court documents, lawyers for Rojas have said that Texas has not proven that Rojas performed abortions nor that she operated outside the scope of her midwifery license. Texas law enforcement, the lawyers argued, “jumped to wild conclusions after overseeing a slipshod investigation”.
The lawyers for Rojas argued that Texas prosecutors relied too heavily on Rojas’s possession of the drug misoprostol as proof that she performed abortions. While misoprostol can be used to end pregnancies, it is also used for an array of other reasons, such as helping to soften a cervix before labor.
“A licensed midwife’s possession of misoprostol is evidence of a midwifery practice, not abortion,” the lawyers argued in court. “If possessing misoprostol were evidence of abortion, then every hospital’s labor-and-delivery ward would be accused of providing abortions.”
In the three years since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, unleashing a wave of state-level abortion bans, anti-abortion activists have escalated their attacks on abortion providers. Louisiana has issued warrants for doctors in New York and California who are accused of mailing abortion pills across state lines, while several individuals – including men whose partners had abortions – have sued abortion providers.
Paxton has, in particular, emerged as a frontline leader in the fight against abortion providers. Late last year, he sued a New York doctor over accusations she provided abortion pills to a Texas woman. He has since sued a New York country clerk who refused to enforce a fine against the doctor, setting up a high-stakes battle over a New York law meant to protect providers from out-of-state prosecutions.
In court, lawyers for Rojas have said that her clinics offered standard midwifery care, including telemedicine.
In court documents filed in Rojas’s case in June, Texas prosecutors accused two of the people recently arrested of working as unlicensed “medical assistants”. Prosecutors cited a witness who said that one of the assistants, Jose Manuel Cendan Ley – who admitted to “triaging patients” – gave her a “vitamin infusion and iron injection”. The other assistant, Sabiel Bosch Gongora, had apps on his phone “used by medical professionals for clinical decision support, including drug interactions, medical guidelines, and disease diagnosis tools”, prosecutors said.
Rojas’s lawyers argued in a September court briefing that prosecutors failed to prove that Ley and Gongora were independently diagnosing and treating patients. They may have been carrying out duties that had been appropriately delegated to them by licensed clinicians, the lawyers said.
Paxton’s press release does not provide evidence for the allegation that the other arrested individuals were operating without the right licensure.
In March, days after Rojas’s arrest, a judge suggested that the case could take years.
