Texas Arrests 3rd Health Care Provider Over Alleged Abortions

The midwife has been licensed in Texas since 2018. But only physicians are permitted to perform abortions in the state. (Several states that protect abortion rights have recently enacted laws to allow midwives and nurse practitioners to offer abortion care, significantly expanding abortion access.) The nurse practitioner who was arrested on Tuesday reportedly has their license on probation by the Board of Nursing, according to ABC13, and has been charged with a conspiracy to practice medicine without a license.

Texas enforces a total abortion ban that threatens abortion providers with a $100,000 fine and life in prison. The midwife and first employee are currently being held on $500,000 bonds for performing an illegal abortion and $200,000 for the medical license charges.

Since the midwife’s arrest, several advocates have raised concerns that she was targeted for her identity and her service to immigrant communities, in particular. “As the Trump administration perpetuates devastating and harmful anti-immigrant sentiment with every decision they make, we know it was a calculated and intentional decision that [Paxton] targeted a Latina midwife committed to working in a primarily Spanish-speaking community, many of whom are immigrants,” says a joint statement from Lupe M. Rodríguez, executive director of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice; Jamarah Amani, executive director of Southern Birth Justice Network; and Dr. Jamila Perritt, president of Physicians for Reproductive Health.

The statement continues, “This is clearly an attack on immigrant communities, who already have a hard time accessing the care they need because of harmful abortion bans and the increased risk of criminalization they face based on their immigration status… For many immigrants in Texas, traveling to another state for abortion care means risking family separation, detention, and deportation.” None of the three individuals have spoken publicly about the charges against them.

Paxton’s office has particularly honed in on the fact that the midwife and the other targeted individuals aren’t physicians. But has so far failed to provide evidence that any patient was harmed by the midwife and her associates. Nonetheless, as legal scholar Mary Ziegler wrote in Slate, his strategy is to justify these arrests as protecting “women’s safety.” Ziegler cited a study of illegal abortion before Roe v. Wade that found licensed physicians who were white and male were substantially less likely to face prosecution than midwives or physicians of color.

Paxton’s claims that he’s trying to protect women are especially laughable in the face of the more than two dozen women who sued the state in 2023 for nearly killing them by denying time-sensitive emergency abortion care for pregnancy complications. We now know of at least three women who have died from these laws. Paxton’s office is also reportedly recruiting men to tell on their partners or ex-partners who have had or attempted to have an abortion. according to the Washington Post. This effort was how Paxton’s office was able to sue Dr. Margaret Carpenter of New York in December, for allegedly sending abortion pills to a woman in Dallas. 

“Generations of midwives have been trained to be an integral part of providing sexual and reproductive health care including prenatal care, birth support, miscarriage management, and abortion care,” Rodríguez, Amani, and Perritt said in their statement. (Midwives and hospitals have around the same rate of complications when it comes to delivering babies; patients with low-risk births are even less likely to face complications working with midwives than in hospitals.) “We know that because of midwives’ critical work in providing support to people who face the most oppression from capitalism and the medical industrial complex, they are historically the first care workers to be targeted by authoritarian and coercive agents of the state.”