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jessica valenti
Alarm as Texas Files State's First Criminal Abortion Charges Against Midwife
"Republicans are strategically targeting people they think the public won't rally behind," said rights advocate Jessica Valenti. "Let's make sure to prove them wrong."
Mar 18, 2025
A midwife in the Houston area on Monday became the first person to be criminally charged under Texas' abortion ban, with Republican state Attorney General Ken Paxton accusing Maria Margarita Rojas of providing illegal abortion care and practicing medicine without a license.
If convicted, Rojas faces up to 20 years in prison under the state's near-total ban on abortion.
Writer and abortion rights advocate Jessica Valenti said Rojas is likely being "targeted" by Paxton, noting that the midwife provides "healthcare to a primarily Spanish-speaking, low-income community."
"Paxton, a political operator who picks cases strategically, 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," wrote Valenti. "In other words: Republicans are strategically targeting people they think the public won't rally behind. Let's make sure to prove them wrong."
Rojas owns and operates Clínicas Latinoamericanas, which includes four health clinics in the Houston suburbs of Spring, Waller, and Cypress. She has reportedly been a certified midwife in Texas since 2018 and was an obstetrician in Peru before immigrating to the United States.
According to The Washington Post, Rojas was first arrested on March 6 on charges of practicing medicine without a license, and was held on $10,000 bond. The new charges were added Monday, and Rojas and another employee of the clinic, Jose Ley, were being held in a jail in Waller County, with their bond set at a combined $1.4 million.
The New York Times noted that Waller County, where the charges were brought, is more conservative than Harris County, the largest county in Texas and the one where a majority of Rojas' clinics are located.
Court documents show that Paxton's office has accused Rojas of having "attempted an abortion on" a woman identified as E.G. in March.
"Paxton and Texas Republicans will be working overtime to paint Rojas as a villain, regardless of the truth. They know that abortion bans are incredibly unpopular, as is arresting healthcare providers."
Rojas was "known by law enforcement to have performed an abortion" on another occasion earlier this year, according to the attorney general, who has filed for a temporary restraining order against Clínicas Latinoamericanas "to prevent further illegal activity."
When she was first arrested, Rojas was "pulled over by the police at gunpoint and handcuffed" while she was on her way to the clinic and was taken to Austin and held overnight before being released, her friend and fellow midwife Holly Shearman told the Post.
Shearman said she did not believe Rojas is guilty of the charges against her.
Valenti emphasized that most details of Rojas' case at this point are being shared by Paxton's office, and warned that the vehemently anti-abortion attorney general will likely attempt to portray the midwife in a negative light to garner support—considering that a majority of Americans don't support criminal charges for health professionals who provide abortion care.
A survey last March by the KFF found that 8 in 10 Democrats, two-thirds of Independents, and about 50% of Republicans did not believe doctors who provide abortion care should face fines or prison time.
"You cannot trust any information coming from Paxton's office or Texas law enforcement," said Valenti. "Paxton and Texas Republicans will be working overtime to paint Rojas as a villain, regardless of the truth. They know that abortion bans are incredibly unpopular, as is arresting healthcare providers. They're not just fighting a legal battle here, but a PR one."
Valenti noted that when Paxton filed a civil lawsuit against Dr. Maggie Carpenter, a physician in New York who he accused of prescribing and sending pills for a medication abortion to a patient in Texas, he claimed the Texas resident "suffered 'serious complications' despite providing no evidence." Carpenter was fined more than $100,000 last month.
"There's every reason to believe Paxton's team will pull similar tactics here, coming out with all sorts of claims about this midwife and her practice," wrote Valenti.
Marc Hearron, interim associate director of ligation at the Center for Reproductive Rights, told the Post that "Texas officials have been trying every which way to terrify healthcare practitioners from providing care and to trap Texans."
Hearron toldThe Cut that "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."
"It's just a litany of situations where it shows the state of Texas does not care about women's lives," said Hearron. "What it cares about is stopping women from getting the care that they need, no matter what."
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'Chaos and Fear' at CDC Amid Order to Retract Journal Articles to Purge 'Forbidden Terms'
"How can the government decide what words a journal can use to describe a scientific reality? That reality needs to be named," one journal editor said.
Feb 02, 2025
Employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been ordered to pull any articles under consideration for publication in medical or scientific journals so that they can be checked for certain "forbidden terms" including gender, transgender, and LGBT.
The order was sent in an email to CDC division heads on Friday by the agency's chief science officer, a federal official toldReuters on Sunday. Inside Medicine broke the news on Saturday and provided a screenshot of the full list of terms that needed to be scrubbed.
"It sounds incredible that this is compatible with the First Amendment. A constitutional right has been canceled," Dr. Alfredo Morabia, editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Public Health, told Reuters. "How can the government decide what words a journal can use to describe a scientific reality? That reality needs to be named."
"We can't just erase or ignore certain populations when it comes to preventing, treating, or researching infectious diseases such as HIV."
The order is an attempt to ensure that CDC is in compliance with U.S. President Donald Trump's executive order mandating that the U.S. government only recognize two sexes: male and female. The papers will be withdrawn so that a Trump appointee can review them.
The "forbidden terms" CDC employees are supposed to avoid are, in full: Gender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, LGBT, transsexual, non-binary, nonbinary, assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth, biologically male, and biologically female, according to Inside Medicine.
The order covers both papers under consideration and those accepted but not published. According to Reuters, if a CDC employee worked on a paper with nongovernmental scientists but did not initiate it, they have been asked to remove their names.
The new order is separate from a demand two days into the administration that government health agencies including CDC freeze all communications with the public. It follows reports on Friday that CDC webpages and datasets involving HIV, the LGBTQ community, youth health, and other topics were no longer accessible as the agency attempts to comply with the Trump executive order on transgender identity and another on banning government Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives.
"It is Orwellian, it really is," Steven Woolf, director emeritus and senior adviser at Virginia Commonwealth University's Center on Society and Health,
In response to the purges, scientists, science journalists, and public health advocates have worked to preserve the datasets, with everything on the CDC website as of January 27, 2024 preserved at ACASignups.net and downloaded data sets also available on Jessica Valenti's Substack Abortion, Every Day.
"Censoring data on ideological grounds is wrong. It is unscientific, and it is designed to eliminate opposition and erase dissidents," virologist Angela Rasmussen, who was involved with the data preservation efforts, wrote on social media.
The journal article retraction order has created uncertainty and confusion at the agency, Inside Medicine reported:
How many manuscripts are affected is unclear, but it could be many. Most manuscripts include simple demographic information about the populations or patients studied, which typically includes gender (and which is frequently used interchangeably with sex). That means just about any major study would fall under the censorship regime of the new policy, including studies on Covid-19, cancer, heart disease, or anything else, let alone anything that the administration considers to be "woke ideology."
Meanwhile, chaos and fear are already guiding decisions. While the policy is only meant to apply to work that might be seen as conflicting with President Trump's executive orders, CDC experts don’t know how to interpret that. Do papers that describe disparities in health outcomes fall into "woke ideology" or not? Nobody knows, and everyone is scared that they'll be fired. This is leading to what Germans call "vorauseilender Gehorsam," or "preemptive obedience," as one non-CDC scientist commented.
There are also concerns that censoring such a broad list of terms would have unintended consequences for public health.
"We can't just erase or ignore certain populations when it comes to preventing, treating, or researching infectious diseases such as HIV. I certainly hope this is not the intent of these orders," Carl Schmid, the executive director of the HIV+ Hepatitis Policy Institute, told Reuters.
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Trump's Anti-Trans Order Could Pave Way for National Abortion Ban
"They are going to try to sneak in that fetal personhood language anywhere they can, anywhere and everywhere," said advocate and author Jessica Valenti.
Jan 23, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance have insisted that the White House would not sign a nationwide abortion ban—despite the latter's expression of support for one as recently as 2022—but an unrelated executive order Trump signed this week may put the country on the path to outlawing abortion care without the president needing to sign any legislation into law.
Reproductive rights advocates including author Jessica Valenti noticed shortly after Trump signed an executive order stating the government will not recognize transgender people that the document included language that was unmistakably linked to the right-wing push for "fetal personhood" laws.
"'Female' means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell," reads the executive order signed on Monday. "'Male' means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell."
Aside from the fact that the order suggests the Trump administration will recognize everyone born in the United States as a female—because in the first weeks after conception, explained one 2001 scientific paper, "fetal genitalia are the same and are phenotypically female"—the document claims that a fetus is a "person" from the moment of conception.
"And so it begins," said Valenti after the executive order was issued. "They are going to try to sneak in that fetal personhood language anywhere they can, anywhere and everywhere."
The order's language is in line with the Republican Party's 2024 platform, which did not call for a nationwide abortion ban but expressed support for states that would establish fetal personhood by extending the protections of the 14th Amendment, which guarantees that "no person can be denied life or liberty without due process," to fetuses.
The Texas Republican Party last year asserted in its platform that "abortion is not healthcare, it is homicide," and said the party would push to extend "equal protection of the laws to all preborn children from the moment of fertilization."
Rights advocates have warned that adoption of the fetal personhood doctrine at the national level could ultimately lead to the prosecution of pregnant people who obtain abortion care—something anti-abortion groups have long claimed they wouldn't support.
When the national GOP platform was released last August, Slate journalist Mark Joseph Stern said its language suggested that "the GOP has recognized that this task is too unpopular to enact democratically, so they're outsourcing it to the federal courts."
"Fetal personhood means a nationwide abortion ban imposed by judicial fiat," said Stern.
Anti-abortion advocates aim to ultimately bring fetal personhood to the U.S. Supreme Court, hoping the right-wing majority would rule that the 14th Amendment applies to fetuses from the moment of conception.
Including a reference to fetal personhood in an unrelated executive order is "an intentional way to continue to normalize the idea that embryos are people," Dana Sussman, senior vice president of Pregnancy Justice, told The Guardian.
"This is yet another attempt to codify it in one form or another," said Sussman.
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