Remember to wait until her lawyers get a chance to respond before making any inferences about this.
The Texas midwife who earlier this year became the first person charged under the state law banning people from performing abortions is now charged with 15 felonies, including a new charge that accuses her of killing an unborn child.
A Waller County indictment expands the number of charges against Maria Rojas, 50, who was the subject of a highly public arrest in March. The indictment accuses Rojas of three counts of performing an abortion and 12 counts of practicing medicine without a license.
A grand jury handed up the indictment in June, but the new charges were never publicized. The Waller County district attorney’s office quietly uploaded a copy of the document to a public folder containing case files last month.
Rojas was arrested based on allegations she attempted to perform an abortion on a woman, identified as E.G. According to a complaint, E.G. was provided with pills meant to induce an abortion. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office used the allegations in E.G.’s case to secure an injunction closing Rojas’ four clinics in Waller and Harris counties.
The June indictment alleges Rojas performed an abortion on another woman, identified as N.M., in October 2024. Unlike the E.G case, the charge specifies that the unborn child died.
It’s the first time the attorney general’s office has alleged that Rojas performed a successful abortion. The criminal complaint released in March referred to two women who an anonymous tipster claimed received abortions from Rojas, but so far they have not been connected to any criminal cases.
AG’s office investigators identified E.G. after staking out Rojas’ clinics and witnessing the woman visit an office on multiple occasions. When approached by investigators, E.G. told them Rojas portrayed herself as an OB-GYN and gave the pregnant woman pills after saying her pregnancy was likely unviable, according to court documents.
The indictment didn’t give any other information about the allegations involving N.M.
Rojas’ defense attorney on Monday said she was still waiting on more information to be shared with her about the new charges.
“We are looking forward to receiving meaningful discovery in these cases so that we can continue to fight vigorously for these charges to come to an end,” said Nicole Deborde Hochglaube.
[…]
Paxton’s office made no announcement about the indictments, and did not mention the new criminal charges in July, when it submitted arguments to the Texas Supreme Court arguing that Rojas’ clinics in Harris and Waller counties should remain closed by a court order.
Rojas’ legal team is continuing to fight the civil court order. In a brief filed Friday, her lawyers said they believed that the counts of practicing medicine without a license should not apply to her, because her midwifery license permitted her to care for pregnant women.
Her lawyers have said the attorney general’s office investigators were “grasping at straws” and trying to conflate women’s health care with crime. The drug that Rojas allegedly gave E.G. was misoprostol, which is commonly used in labor and delivery and to treat miscarriages, her lawyers wrote.
See here, here, and here for more on the criminal charges; see here and here for more on the civil order to shut down her clinic. This case is strange in many ways, and for obvious reasons I don’t trust anything from Waller County or the AG’s office. We’ll just have to wait for the next batch of filings and rulings.