WATCH: Catherine and her baby survived seven forced abortion attempts

Catherine Pressly Herring, a domestic abuse survivor whose husband tried to forcibly abort their child by chemical abortion, sat down with Lila Rose to tell her story.

Key Takeaways:

In 2022, Texas attorney Mason Herring was arrested after he tried numerous times to force his wife, Catherine Pressly Herring, into an abortion.
When Catherine found out she was pregnant with the couple's third child, Mason repeatedly poisoned her with abortion drugs, though ultimately, she and her preborn daughter survived.
Catherine spoke with Live Action founder and president Lila Rose about the terrifying experience.

The Details:

Catherine began by pointing out that the most surprising thing about her story is the perpetrator: her husband of 11 years.

"I think a lot of stories come out about abortion pills with young girls who are in college or dating; maybe it's a casual dating experience," she said. "But my experience with an abortion pill poisoning was actually with my husband of 11 years. We had a six-year-old and a two-year-old at the time. We were not actively stopping a pregnancy, and we were actually having discussions about having another child. A pregnancy was not out of the blue, initially."

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Then Mason asked Catherine for a separation, which she had said was completely unexpected; a week later, she found out she was pregnant:

"It was terrifying. Everything felt really upside down. I felt like he was acting strange enough that I needed to say this in front of our marriage counselor, and have a witness to his reaction. His reaction did not go over well.

That was the launching point to all of this.

Already, your maternal instincts are pretty heightened in pregnancy, and everything felt a little off. The marriage counselor suggested that we go on a trip together, go on spring break, which happened to be that same week. We did.

The day after we returned home from spring break, he brought me breakfast in bed. That's the first domino that fell."

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The breakfast in bed was strange because Mason was not living at their home, but was staying in a hotel. He also told her she had not been drinking enough water on their trip, and he suspected she was dehydrated.

Catherine said the entire experience was unusual, and had her on guard:

"We started talking about the plans for the day with the kids and what was going to happen. He slowly started shifting from being sweet into being impatient, and urging me to drink faster. 'I need to go. I need to get to the office. You're taking too long.'

Like, this is so strange. I'm eating my biscuit. All of a sudden, he jumped off the bed, stood up, and he was hovering over me. He said, 'You need to drink faster. I need to go.' He was angry. He was like, 'Chug the water.' That's not normally something that a husband says to a wife, chug something.

It was at that moment that I pulled the cup away from my lips and looked down for the first time. And the water was not clear. It was creamy, kind of milky. But at that point, I had consumed about three-fourths of the water. I immediately asked him, 'What is this? What is in this cup?'

And he grabbed the cup out of my hands, and he looked down into it himself. And he said, 'Oh, weird. I must have grabbed a dirty cup.' And he immediately left the house with the cup."

What Happened Next:

Catherine said that within 30 minutes, she started experiencing violent cramps, and wasn't even able to make it to the bathroom before being sick. Yet she still remained in denial that Mason could have done this to her.

"I think the most dangerous part about domestic violence is your head and your heart play against each other," she explained. "This is a person I love. There's no way that he caused this. And so my first thought was, I must be having food poisoning."

Once it happened again, however, she realized it wasn't just food poisoning, but that he was drugging her with something. "It was so confusing," she said. "I was really trying to think, okay, what could be in the cup? Was he trying to hurt me, or was he trying to hurt the baby?"

She eventually googled abortion pill reversal, called the hotline, and spoke to a nurse. After explaining what had been happening, the nurse recommended she begin taking progesterone:

"So for those out there listening that don't know how chemical abortion pills work, they work by cutting off your hormone production. And so adding progesterone back in replenishes your natural hormones for your pregnancy.

And she said, even if this turns out not to be an abortion pill poisoning, it won't harm you to take the progesterone. It was just a preventative action."

Eventually, Catherine began bleeding, so she went to the hospital, where her symptoms continued to get worse, leading doctors to fear she was going into kidney failure. She was given antibiotics, and on an ultrasound, she saw that her daughter was miraculously still alive.

And yet, Mason arrived at the emergency room with another drink for her:

"I didn't know what to do. And the emergency room did not know what to do. These are not cases that they see every day, thankfully.

But I wasn't given a lot of guidance. Everybody was questioning, should I call the police? I'm like, 'I can't call the police, I don't have any evidence.' My now ex-husband was a very successful trial attorney, and I knew there was no way I could prove that this had happened to me.

So I spoke with social workers. They came in, kind of guided me on what I should do. We talked through whether I should contact the police.

And interestingly, my medical records did not indicate any of this information was going on. My medical records did not say I had been poisoned at that time. We did not have confirmation that it was abortion pills in my system."

After leaving the hospital, Mason continued to try to give her drinks. This time, however, he did not watch her drink them, so Catherine was able to collect them for testing.

"I actually contacted a private investigator after those next drinks," she said. "Once I obtained some evidence, I took it to a private investigator and he helped me work to try to test the liquids. That proved to be very, very difficult. So you can test urine samples and blood samples for pharmaceutical drugs much easier than just a glass of water. So it took a lot of time, and thankfully we kind of had this lull in the middle where we could kind of get a plan together with my team."

The sixth drink involved their daughter.

"He left them in my two-year-old's room unattended," she said. "And very casually, as he left the house, he said, 'The red one is for our daughter. The blue one is for you.' And... you can handle a lot when it's on you; when it's about your children and your pregnancy, it's just a whole 'nother experience."

After seven attempts, Mason was caught on camera throwing abortion pill packets into the trash.

"He had brought in a baggie of crushed up powder and he pulled it out of his pocket, put it into a cup, and then topped it with cranberry juice from my fridge," she recalled.

At that point, she had enough evidence to go to the Houston Police Department, who ran tests to confirm he was drugging her with abortion pills. He was arrested, and she was able to obtain a restraining order against him, but the experience was traumatizing for Catherine.

"I've been diagnosed with complex PTSD from just having to relive this over and over for so many years to try to prove what happened," she said.

The Bottom Line:

Today, Catherine's daughter is alive, and though it took time, she is developmentally on track and thriving at four years old.

"She is a miracle girl," she said. "It's been a long road. My water broke 12 weeks early. She was born at 30 weeks and she has spent over 160 days in ICU in her life. At 14 months she was non-verbal, non-mobile, did not eat or drink by mouth. So she has come a very long way. I'm so grateful for her therapist, and we've just poured everything we could into her. So she's our little miracle."

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