A lawyer accused of slipping abortion-inducing drugs into his estranged wife’s drinks after she announced she was pregnant is facing up to 10 years behind bars.

Victim Catherine Herring had announced the pregnancy at a couple’s counselling meeting just two weeks after they had separated, say court documents in Harris County, Texas, USA.

Husband Mason Herring, 38 – say prosecutors – tried to cause her to abort the baby after dosing her water and juice drinks with a powerful abortion-inducing drug.

The suspicious mum-to-be began refusing the drinks when she found she was bleeding heavily from her vagina after one dose.

Amazingly, the baby survived and was born prematurely. The child is said to be healthy and doing well.

Now Herring is facing felony charges of assault on a pregnant person and assault by forcing induction to have an abortion.

Court documents say that Herring was having an affair with a woman he worked with and wanted to terminate the pregnancy because it “would ruin his plans and make him look like a jerk.”

According to court documents obtained by Newsflash on Tuesday, 15th November Catherine Herring filed a complaint against her husband on 27th April, reportedly accusing him of slipping abortion drugs into her water for weeks.

The document states that Herring and his wife had separated approximately two weeks before she told him in couples counselling on 8th March that she was pregnant with their third child.

The couple, who have reportedly been married for 11 years, then spent a few weeks together, after it was suggested by the counsellor, who has not been named, with their two children, in West Texas.

This is when Herring “began talking to her about her hydration, stating that she needed to drink more water”, the court document quotes Katherine as telling investigators.

The court documents also stated that Catherine said her husband “presented the cup of water and told her that she needed to drink more and that he would not leave until she drank the whole cup.”

She also told investigators that “she drank out of the cup and stopped to take a breath, noticing that the water inside the cup appeared to be cloudy.”

She asked Herring “about this and he stated that perhaps the cup was dirty or the pipes were dirty.”

Catherine then reportedly told investigators that about half an hour later she was violently ill and had diarrhoea, soiling herself after failing to make it to the toilet in time.

This is when she began to suspect that something had been put into her drink, according to the document, and after having diarrhoea two more times, she noticed that she was bleeding, “much like having her period”.

She then went to the doctor’s and they took a urine sample. The following day, her husband gave her another drink “in an orange sports bottle” but instead of drinking it, she kept it.

Later, she reportedly went through the rubbish after her husband took it out and found “opened blister packs labeled as ‘Cyrux,’ which she discovered was a Mexican pharmacy version of the American drug Cytotec and the main ingredient of which is Misoprostol, a drug that [Catherine] knows is used to cause abortion.”

Herring was also allegedly caught on camera preparing a drink in the family kitchen before “taking a Ziplock bag out of his pocket and emptying the contents into the drink”.

Herring has been charged with “assault of a pregnant person” and “assault – forced induction to have an abortion”.

He was reportedly released on a USD 30,000 bond and if convicted, he faces two to 10 years behind bars and a USD 10,000 fine.

He is the first and only person in Harris County to have been charged with “assault – forced induction to have an abortion”, according to local media and is next set to appear in court on 2nd December.

The charges reportedly fall under a 2022 statute that criminalises abortion in Texas.

The statute was introduced after the US Supreme Court overruled the famous Roe v Wade ruling in June that had provided Americans with some abortion rights for some 50 years.