By: Angela Chen
Published: May 14, 2025
“In Texas, life is sacred . . . I will always do everything in my power to protect the unborn, defend our state’s pro-life laws and work to ensure that unlicensed individuals endangering the lives of women by performing illegal abortions are fully prosecuted.”[1] Those are the words of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in a press release announcing the arrest of a midwife, Maria Margarita Rojas, who was accused of providing abortion care in Texas. [2] Ms. Rojas is accused of attempting to perform an abortion on two occasions in March of 2025, and being known by law enforcement to have performed an abortion earlier in 2025.[3] As nearly all abortion is illegal in Texas,[4] Ms. Rojas was charged with a second-degree felony for the illegal performance of an abortion and was held on a $500,000 bond.[5]
Following the state abortion bans made possible by the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey with Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, eleven states have since established criminal penalties for clinicians who violate their state’s abortion ban.[6] Medical providers, however, are not the only group being charged with abortion-related offenses following the Supreme Court’s turn against reproductive care.[7] Those who work in the medical, reproductive, or childbirth field but are not doctors, and even just individuals helping others obtain abortion care, can and have been criminalized.[8] In what first case of an individual being charged by felony indictment for receiving abortion pills by mail, Louisiana prosecutors charged a thirty-nine-year-old woman with criminal abortion by means of abortion-inducing drugs.[9] The mother is being accused of obtaining abortion pills from an out-of-state doctor for her teenage daughter to use to end her pregnancy.[10] The indictment came just months after Louisiana became the first state to reclassify the abortion medications, mifepristone and misoprostol, as Schedule IV drugs under the Louisiana Uniform Controlled Dangerous Substances Law.[11] This criminalization of abortion is a strategy employed by states who have passed abortion bans to enforce them and prevent “circumvention” of the law through medical abortion.[12]
In the year following the Dobbs decision, 210 pregnant individuals were charged with crimes related to pregnancy, pregnancy loss, or birth, marking the highest number of pregnancy-related charges recorded since researchers began tracking cases in 1973.[13] One way in which anti-abortion advocates are attempting to push the criminalization of pregnancy is through the passage of state fetal personhood laws.[14] Advocates for fetal personhood laws argue that fetuses should be treated the same under the law as people.[15] Under a theory of fetal personhood, abortion constitutes murder – Roe stood as a defense against fetal personhood laws and protected access to reproductive care.[16] Post-Dobbs, however, the fetal personhood movement has been gaining momentum.[17] In the 2025 legislative session alone, at least ten states introduced bills referring to embryos or fetuses as “unborn” or “preborn” children, which equate obtaining an abortion to homicide.[18] Three of these bills failed to advance, but there is concern that fetal personhood laws are more likely to pass now without the protections of Roe.[19]
Regardless of these laws, pregnant people will continue to seek abortion care post-Dobbs, but the growing criminalization of pregnancy will disproportionately impact pregnant individuals who are low-income and/or people of color.[20] Between 1973 and 2005, fifty-two percent of the pregnant people arrested were Black women, and seventy-one of the pregnant people arrested qualified for a public defender.[21] The general increased criminalization of pregnancy post-Dobbs coupled with the passage of fetal personhood laws as a tool to increase pregnancy and birth-related crimes will result in further racial and socioeconomic disparities in the criminal legal system and should be prevented. The attempts of anti-abortion advocates to broaden the scope of who can face criminal charges related to providing or facilitating abortion-related care threaten to deepen already existing disparities in the criminal legal system.[22]
The growing criminalization of abortion care following Dobbs, whether it be through the expansion of parties vulnerable to prosecution or the passage of fetal personhood laws, presents a challenge for people seeking abortion care, medical providers, and loved ones of pregnant people seeking abortion and reproductive care.[23] As states who have implemented abortion bans continue to try to enforce them through criminalization, those seeking abortion care will be left with less and less options to protect them from potential prosecution.
[1] J. David Goodman, Texas Arrests Midwife and Associate on Charges of Providing Abortions, N.Y. Times (Mar. 17, 2025), https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/17/us/politics/abortion-arrest.html.
[2] Nadine Yousif, Texas authorities arrest midwife for allegedly providing abortions, BBC News (Mar. 18, 2025), https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c74kr8vp4w0o.
[3] Goodman, supra note 1.
[4] Abortion Laws, Tex. State L. Libr. (Mar. 19, 2025), https://guides.sll.texas.gov/abortion-laws/general-information.
[5] Goodman, supra note 1; Tex. Health & Safety Code § 170A.002 (LexisNexis).
[6] Mabel Felix, Laurie Sobel, & Alina Salganicoff, Criminal Penalties for Physicians in State Abortion Bans, KFF (Mar. 4, 2025), https://www.kff.org/womens-health-policy/issue-brief/criminal-penalties-for-physicians-in-state-abortion-bans/#:~:text=No%20clinician%20has%20yet%20been,in%20Louisiana%20(discussed%20below).
[7] See Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Org., 597 U.S. 215, 230-32 (2022); see also Adrienne R. Ghorashi & DeAnna Baumle, Legal and Health Risks of Abortion Criminalization: State Policy Responses in the Immediate Aftermath of Dobbs, 37 J.L & Health 1, 3 (2023) (noting that “within six months of the Dobbs ruling, nearly a third of states severely restricted abortion”).
[8] See Joseph Choi, Texas makes 2 more abortion arrests, The Hill (Mar. 18, 2025), https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/5200780-texas-ken-paxton-abortion-arrests; Margery A. Beck, Nebraska mother sentenced to 2 years in prison for giving abortion pills to pregnant daughter, Associated Press (Sept. 22, 2023), https://apnews.com/article/abortion-charges-nebraska-sentence-36b3dcaadd6b705ca2315bc95b99bdc1.
[9] Stephanie McNeal, A Louisiana Mom Has Pled Not Guilty to Giving Her Daughter Pills for a ‘Criminal Abortion,’ Glamour (Mar. 11, 2025), https://www.glamour.com/story/a-louisiana-mom-has-pled-not-guilty-to-giving-her-daughter-pills-for-a-criminal-abortion; La. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 14:87.9 (LexisNexis).
[10] Sara Cline, Louisiana Woman Pleads Not Guilty to a Felony in Historic Abortion Case, Associated Press (Mar. 11, 2025, 7:58 PM), https://apnews.com/article/louisiana-new-york-states-abortion-doctor-d344fa0a6f263fd2120b93ecfd62e894.
[11] Id.; S.B. 276, 2024 Reg. Sess. (La. 2025).
[12] Jolynn Dellinger & Stephanie K. Pell, The criminalization of abortion and surveillance of women in a post-Dobbs world, Brookings (Apr. 18, 2024), https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-criminalization-of-abortion-and-surveillance-of-women-in-a-post-dobbs-world/.
[13] Pregnancy Just., Pregnancy as a Crime: A Preliminary Report on the First Year After Dobbs (2024), https://www.pregnancyjusticeus.org/pregnancy-as-a-crime-a-preliminary-report-on-the-first-year-after-dobbs/#:~:text=Pregnancy%20As%20a%20Crime%20covers,sense%2C%20this%20is%20nothing%20new.
[14] See Sarah Corning, Recentering Pregnancy: A Response to Fetal Personhood, 35 Stan. L. & Pol’y Rev. 322, 323 (2024) (“Under the guise of fetal protection, the anti-abortion movement has successfully passed laws that prioritize the fetus over the pregnant person; laws that are used to control and punish pregnant people”); Chantelle Lee, Some States Consider Bills That Would Punish People Seeking Abortions, TIME (Mar. 18, 2025, 4:28 PM), https://time.com/7269263/bills-punishing-people-seeking-abortions/.
[15] See Corning, supra note 14, at 324.
[16] Id.
[17] Lee, supra note 14.
[18] Id.
[19] Id.
[20] See Patty Skuster, Prosecutorial Discretion for Self-Managed Abortion Helpers, 51 J.L. Med. Ethics 565 (2023); Reva B. Siegel & Mary Ziegler, Abortion’s New Criminalization—a History-and-Tradition Right to Healthcare Access After Dobbs, 111 Va. L. Rev. 102, 104 (2025).
[21] Ghorashi & Baumle, supra note 7.
[22] See The Sentencing Project, Report to the United Nations on Racial Disparities in the U.S. Criminal Justice System (2018), https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/report-to-the-united-nations-on-racial-disparities-in-the-u-s-criminal-justice-system/.
[23] See Patrick Boyle & Stacy Weiner, Bans on abortion and transgender care have criminalized medicine, putting patients and doctors at risk, Ass’n of Am. Med. Colls. (Nov. 11, 2024), https://www.aamc.org/news/bans-abortion-and-transgender-care-have-criminalized-medicine-putting-patients-and-doctors-risk; McNeal, supra note 9.