“He sat on the bed. He brought me a cup of water in a cream-colored plastic cup and a biscuit. And he said, ‘During our trip, I noticed you weren’t drinking enough water. And for the sake of your pregnancy, I want you to stay hydrated.’ And then he went on to say, ‘I’m not going to leave here until you finish this entire cup of water.’ It was when he insisted that she ‘drink faster’ that Catherine looked down in her cup for the first time. What was left was a murky, almost milky-white liquid. And she knew something was very, very wrong.” 

Staring into the dregs, Catherine’s mind was gripped by panic. “Was he trying to harm me or the baby?” she remembers thinking. “I had no idea what was in the cup at the time. It could have been lighter fluid. I had no idea.” With her marriage on the rocks, the pregnancy had come at an inopportune time. But the idea that they wouldn’t keep the baby never occurred to her. It occurred to her husband Mason, though. And he tried six more times in 38 days to spike her drinks with the abortion drug.

“I would take the cup and pretend to drink it or pour a little bit out and make him think that I was drinking it.” Ultimately, she hired a private investigator, who helped her test the liquid. When she found out it was mifepristone, “I couldn’t believe it,” she told Family Research Council’s Casey Harper.

No doubt she also can’t believe that every single Democrat in Congress is turning a blind eye to these horror stories. In an absolutely diabolical development, all 259 House and Senate members are actively fighting to put every American woman in the same position as Catherine by lobbying the court to let moms (and their sinister boyfriends, traffickers, husbands) get their hands on the abortion drug without ever seeing a doctor — an absolutely crucial safeguard against coercion.

In a jaw-dropping announcement, the entire Democratic caucus — all 47 senators and 212 representatives — filed a brief with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals taking the fringe position that making the abortion pill a free-for-all with no medical oversight somehow threatens “patient care.” Catherine and an army of walking wounded are living proof of just how wrong they are.

This FDA policy to strip away any accountability on this drug — which also lands 11% of women in the hospital (a percentage that argues convincingly for a complete mifepristone ban) — was the brainchild of Joe Biden’s, who believed the agency’s commonsense conditions for accessing the pills would rob too many moms of the opportunity to destroy their unborn babies. Turns out, it also gave predatory men a free pass to abuse women and kill their unwanted sons and daughters.

What happened to Catherine Herring and a sickening number of mothers is the direct result of the rule that Democrats are demanding the government keep. “The FDA enabled [this],” Dr. Christina Francis, a board-certified OB/Gyn stressed. “They removed the in-person dispensing requirement. So now these drugs are dispensed online, sent through the mail. Catherine’s ex-husband was able to get a hold of them, and he obviously wasn’t pregnant when he was getting the drugs.”

Francis talked about an exposé video she did where she visited these websites. “They never asked for ID. I put in that I was a 13-year-old with all of these health conditions. I paid the money. They were shipped to me in Indiana where abortion is illegal,” all things that should have flagged her order and prevented her from getting mifepristone. “But I could have easily been a man just making up answers to questions, you know? … I could have just as easily been an abuser who was getting online to order these drugs.”

Pointing to the complication rate for the drug — an astonishing 11% — Francis could only shake her head. As if the coercion piece of the puzzle weren’t compelling enough, mifepristone (with or without a doctor’s oversight) is incredibly dangerous to the mother. “We likely have deaths in the U.S. from these drugs that are not documented. … [W]e know of close to 40, but that’s just from either news reports or that they were actually reported to the FDA. But how many occur?” She paused before adding, “I’m also thinking, how many women has this happened to [like Catherine], where their abusers have given them these drugs, and they didn’t know it? And maybe they went to the emergency room legitimately thinking they were having a natural miscarriage, because the symptoms just start, the bleeding just starts, and they legitimately have no idea. I mean, I obviously will never have a way to know how many times that has occurred.”

And yet, the Democratic Party — in complete defiance of the broad American consensus on this drug — is staking out a position that’s not only fringe but lethal to the women they claim to represent. Regardless of where people fall on abortion’s legality — or even mifepristone’s — the overwhelming majority of this country thinks women should have to get a doctor’s approval for the drugs. Regardless of who’s commissioning the polling, the results are the same: at least 70% believe the Trump administration should reinstate the in-person requirement for prescribing the drug. More than two-thirds (68%) agree that patient safety — not abortion pill access — should be the most important factor in this debate. Eighty-six percent also think women should be warned about the consequences first.

Democrats don’t seem to care that moms’ lives hang in the balance, calling the idea an “onerous nationwide restriction.” “Reinstating an in-person dispensing requirement for mifepristone exacerbates an already significant reproductive health crisis by limiting access to the most common method of early abortion,” they claim. Yet the only health crisis most Americans care about is the one deceiving women into thinking the pill is safe.

Just when we think we’ve seen it all, Democrats go and carve out another position so radical, indefensible, and controversial that even their base is left scratching their heads. As FRC’s Joy Stockbauer emphasized, “Accessing abortion drugs without in-person medical oversight doesn’t improve a woman’s life in any way. An in-person requirement for abortion drugs prevents life-threatening situations like undiagnosed ectopic pregnancies or women taking the drugs later in pregnancy than the FDA has approved. An in-person requirement prevents abusers and traffickers from obtaining these drugs and forcing them on pregnant women without their knowledge or consent,” she added. “It’s not patriarchal or paternalistic for our laws to require that women experience medically necessary interventions before pursuing an abortion.”

As a society, Stockbauer told The Washington Stand, “We’ve overcorrected from the days when women were denied equal rights as human beings and citizens — and actually come to a point where progressive ideologies are harming women instead of upholding us. Democrats are so focused on looking like they empower women that they’ve stopped paying attention to how their policies actually affect us,” she shook her head. “And to be clear, the GOP isn’t off the hook either. The Trump administration has yet to reverse Biden-era policies on abortion drugs.”

“An in-person requirement for abortion drugs should be a bipartisan slam dunk. It’s common sense. It’s such a bare minimum protection that even the Obama administration kept it in place. The fact that not a single elected Democrat can see that anymore should scare us all, no matter where we stand politically,” she concluded.