Earlier this month, Texas lawyer Mason Herring was sentenced to just six months in prison after trying to force his wife into an abortion without her knowledge or consent.
Catherine Herring told The Daily Beast that she and Mason had been separated, but were trying to work on their marriage when she became pregnant with their third child. A counselor had encouraged them to spend spring break together, which they had done — but Mason began behaving suspiciously. He served her breakfast in bed, but it included a tall glass of water that he kept pressuring her to drink.
“He starts urging me, like, ‘Chug it, I need to go,’ and he kind of had anger in his voice,” she said. “All of a sudden I was like, ‘Something weird is going on.’ And that’s when I looked down into the cup and saw that the water wasn’t clear.”
Mason had been putting misoprostol into his wife’s drinks, hoping it would cause an abortion.
Soon after he left for work, she became violently ill and went to the hospital. She was bleeding heavily, and her urine sample was “almost black,” leading her to fear she had been poisoned. She called her mother to the hospital to stay with her, but didn’t tell her what she feared: that her husband had done this to her.
“I just wanted desperately to be wrong,” Catherine said. “I wanted there to be another explanation, because this is your husband who you love and adore and have children with. But my instinct was, ‘Something’s wrong, I need to protect myself.’ And I just need to make sure he doesn’t know I’m onto him. Because I really felt like that was the only way I could collect evidence.”
Once she got home, Mason continued trying to give her drinks, still with the powdery substance in them. She kept them, and brought them to a private investigator for testing. While waiting for the results, she found a blister pack of Cyrux — a generic version of misoprostol — in the trash, and cameras inside the house caught him putting a white powder into her drinks. Catherine then went to the police, and eventually, Mason was arrested.
He was charged with felony assault to induce abortion, to which he pled guilty. Catherine tried to push against the plea deal, but was rebuffed, and she also harshly criticized the light sentence he was given. “I do not believe that 180 days is justice for attempting to kill your child seven separate times,” she said in her victim impact statement.
Catherine’s child thankfully survived, although she was born premature, uses a feeding tube to eat, and requires multiple therapies. “She is a special needs child,” Catherine said. “Every day is a struggle for her. This impacts us on a daily basis, even now.”
