By Daniel Wiessner
July 23 (Reuters) – A Texas state appeals court on Thursday ruled that the state attorney general had no evidence to support claims that a Houston midwife who was the first person charged with violating Texas’ criminal ban on abortion had performed illegal abortions, and reversed an order shuttering three clinics she managed.
The Austin-based Texas Fifteenth Court of Appeals said a state judge had improperly relied on evidence from a related criminal prosecution against Maria Rojas, who last year became the first person charged with violating the state’s near-total ban on abortion.
Rojas is still facing felony charges, but the appeals court ruling is a setback for a separate civil lawsuit by the office of Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, seeking money damages and to prevent Rojas from practicing.
The court said a filing in her criminal case that established probable cause to arrest her should not have been admitted in the separate civil case.
“The trial court abused its discretion in granting the temporary injunctive relief,” Justice Scott Field wrote for a three-judge panel.
Paxton’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Jenna Hudson of the Center for Reproductive Rights, an abortion rights group that represents Rojas, said that despite the legal victory it will be nearly impossible for Rojas to re-open the clinics where she practiced.
“The state should be doing everything it can to make sure [pregnant women] can get the health care they need, not shutting down desperately needed health care providers based on trumped-up evidence and a shoddy investigation,” Hudson said in a statement.
Rojas, who has pleaded not guilty, was arrested in March 2025 and charged with performing abortions and practicing medicine without a license.
Paxton’s office claims that Rojas employed other midwives at three clinics who falsely presented themselves as licensed medical professionals to provide medical treatment. Eight other people who worked at Rojas’ clinics were arrested last October.
The cases are an escalation of a nationwide legal battle over abortion rights that has focused on efforts by Republican-led states to ban the procedure and attempts in response to expand access to abortion drugs and other services.
The U.S. Supreme Court in 2022 overturned its landmark Roe v. Wade decision that had established a constitutional right to have an abortion, paving the way for states to ban it.
(Reporting by Daniel Wiessner in Albany, New York, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Alistair Bell)
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