Post-Roe Chaos in states | Trump pardons anti-abortion activists
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Texas Arrests Midwife and Associate on Charges of Providing Abortions
The two arrests in greater Houston appear to be the first time health care providers have been charged with violating abortion bans in their state since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022.
Texas Midwife Charged in Abortion Case
The two arrests in greater Houston appear to be the first time health care providers have been charged with violating abortion bans in their state since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022.
“… Ken Paxton, the attorney general in Texas, said in a statement that the midwife, Maria Margarita Rojas, operated clinics in several towns around Houston, including two in Harris County, the state’s most populous county, and one in Waller County, a more rural and conservative jurisdiction where the charges were brought.
The statement said that she had been “charged with the illegal performance of an abortion,” which has been a second-degree felony since the state’s near-total abortion ban took effect in 2022. She was also charged with practicing medicine without a license.
Court records released late Monday indicated that a person who worked with Ms. Rojas, Jose Ley, 29, was also arrested and charged with the same offenses. The records showed Ms. Rojas and Mr. Ley were being held on $500,000 bond in Waller County, west of Houston, where the charges were brought.
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In a handful of cases, charges have been brought against people who provided abortion pills to relatives, either with their knowledge or without.
The state of Louisiana indicted a New York doctor on criminal charges earlier this year for mailing abortion medications to a Louisiana woman in violation of the state’s ban. New York has resisted requests to extradite the doctor under the state’s shield law, which protects providers from prosecution in states with abortion bans.
… Ms. Rojas was not charged with the highest degree of the charge, which occurs when the abortion results in termination of the pregnancy. It was not clear why she had been charged that way. A spokesman for Mr. Paxton did not respond to requests for comment. …”
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Anti-Abortion Lawyer Pushed Out of F.D.A. After Republican Senator’s Pressure Campaign
Hilary Perkins, a career lawyer and a conservative, was targeted by Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri for defending the Biden administration’s position on the abortion pill.
Since 2019, Hilary Perkins had proudly served as a career lawyer for the government. She took seriously a basic tenet of the job, which is to argue the position of the administration, no matter the political stripes of the boss you serve. A Christian conservative hired under President Trump, she went on to defend the availability of the abortion pill under President Biden.
But last week, three days after becoming chief counsel of the Food and Drug Administration, Ms. Perkins abruptly resigned, forced out by a pressure campaign instigated by Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri. “It turns out this Biden lawyer has argued FOR Biden’s outrageous pro-abortion rules in *many* cases,” he wrote on social media.
He omitted that Ms. Perkins worked on the opposite side of a case his wife, Erin Hawley, took to the Supreme Court over access to the pill, mifepristone. He also did not mention that, in at least one other instance, Ms. Perkins had worked to keep limits on the drug’s availability.
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“Senator Hawley’s accusations against me are false,” Ms. Perkins told The New York Times. “I am not who he says I am. I am a Christian who is both conservative and pro-life and who simply followed my oath as a Department of Justice career attorney. He should be fighting for me, not against me.”
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Woman charged after fetus found in dumpster - Tifton Gazette
A woman has been charged in connection with the fetus that was found dead Thursday at Brookfield-Mews Apartment Complex.
tiftongazette.com
A woman has been charged in connection with the fetus that was found dead Thursday at Brookfield-Mews Apartment Complex. Selena Maria Chandler-Scott, 24, of Tifton, is charged with one count of concealing the death of another person and one count of throwing away or abandonment of a dead body, Tifton police said in a press release Friday. Police said Scott is being held in the Tift County Sheriff’s Office awaiting her first court appearance. At about 6 a.m. Thursday, emergency medical services responded to a call at the apartment complex regarding an unconscious woman who was bleeding. Upon arrival, EMS determined that the woman had suffered a miscarriage earlier, police said in an initial press release Thursday. She was immediately transported to Tift Regional Medical Center for treatment. During the EMS response, a witness said the mother had earlier placed the fetus in a bag and placed that bag in a dumpster outside, police said. Tifton police recovered the deceased fetus.
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“Texas Republicans have proposed changes to the state’s strict abortion ban they say would make clear that doctors can terminate pregnancies for serious medical risks without having to wait until a patient’s condition becomes life-threatening.
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The bill, which will have its first committee hearing in the state Senate today, represents a remarkable reversal for Republican leaders who had for years insisted no changes were needed. It was written by state Sen. Bryan Hughes, the author of the original ban who said just four months ago that exceptions for medical emergencies were “plenty clear.” Texas’ governor and lieutenant governor have signaled support for the bill.
It is part of a wave of legislation responding to public pressure after ProPublica’s reporting revealed preventable maternal deaths in states with abortion bans. Bills that have the most traction have been filed and championed by the same Republicans who passed the bans and they have earned a mixed reception. …”
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Stuffed in the 900-page Project 2025 playbook, among the strategies to ban abortion pills and gut federal agencies, are several proposals to limit access to birth control. One of the groups on the advisory board of Project 2025 is Alliance Defending Freedom, a right-wing Christian legal organization that wrote the Mississippi abortion ban the Supreme Court used to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022 and thereby end the federal right to abortion.
That same day, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the court should reconsider the right to birth control. Now that Donald Trump is back in the White House, ADF has been busy doing things like arguing that states have free reign to kick Planned Parenthood out of Medicaid for providing non-abortion services like birth control. Their latest stunt is trying to get the Trump administration to start chipping away at insurance coverage of contraception.
Last week, ADF sent a letter urging the Department of Health and Human Services to end any federal agreements it has with the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), which it derided as a “pro-abortion” organization. ACOG was founded in 1951 as a professional association for providers of full-spectrum reproductive healthcare for women; it has 60,000 members across the U.S.
ACOG and its related foundation have two government grants: The first funds an advisory panel that recommends which preventive services, like contraception and health screenings, health insurance should cover without cost-sharing, known as the Women’s Preventive Services Initiative, or WPSI. The second funds the creation of protocols to make childbirth safer and generally improve maternity care—this is through a program called Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Health, or AIM.
ADF claims that this preventive maternity care work ACOG does for HHS violates Trump’s executive orders banning the use of federal funds to promote gender identity, DEI policies, and abortion. As ADF senior counsel and director of regulatory practice Matt Bowman said in a statement, “We urge the HHS to withdraw funds to ACOG and ensure federal money is promoting actual health priorities for Americans, not funding left-wing activism.” (Bowman worked in HHS during the first Trump administration, where he assisted in the effort to block migrant girls in U.S. custody from getting abortions.)
Let’s break this down, starting with the birth control part. The Affordable Care Act says insurance companies have to cover a range of women’s preventive health services without cost-sharing like co-pays or deductibles. The law doesn’t name which services, but rather tasks an HHS agency to determine what services have strong evidence showing health benefits. That agency gave a contract to ACOG, which convenes the WPSI panel that includes representatives from its membership and three other major professional organizations. One of the panel’s recommendations is that “adolescent and adult women have access to the full range of contraceptives and contraceptive care to prevent unintended pregnancies and improve birth outcomes.” So insurance in the U.S. has to cover birth control pills, patches, rings, implants, IUDs, and tubal ligation without additional costs beyond people’s monthly premiums.
Groups like ADF do not like this requirement—especially the mandated coverage of IUDs and emergency contraception like Plan B or Ella. Conservatives falsely claim that these methods block implantation of fertilized eggs, which they believe is tantamount to abortion. (ADF represented one of the plaintiffs in the 2014 Hobby Lobby case who objected to covering these methods.) “This mandate has included a coverage requirement for contraception, including some items that can prevent the implantation of embryos after conception,” the ADF letter notes. “The failure to offer robust religious and moral exemptions to that mandate led to years of litigation and repeated trips to the U.S. Supreme Court.” Yes, they want employers to be able to object to covering birth control in their insurance plans for either religious or moral reasons, which could really mean anything, including sexist and eugenic objections to single women or people with disabilities being sexually active.