On June 29, a 32-year-old Texas woman was caught driving in a high-occupancy-vehicle lane by herself. When she was pulled over, she claimed that her baby counted as another person.
The rule for driving in HOVs is you have to have a passenger in the car or two people in the car.
The woman, Brandy Bottone of Plano, was driving on the HOV lane so she could pick up another child earlier. She knew she couldn’t be “a minute late”. A police officer looked inside the car and made her pull over.
With the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which made every fetus a person, Bottone thought her fetus would be counted as a person. She later said, “I pointed to my stomach and said, ‘my baby girl is right here. She is a person.’”
The police officers respond by saying that there has to be “two people outside of the body”. After a little bit of arguing, the police officer said that he didn’t want to “deal with this”, and Bottone received a $215 ticket.
When Amy O’Donnell, a spokeswoman for an anti-abortion group was asked, about the exact same thing, she said, “While the penal code in Texas recognizes an unborn child as a person in our state, the Texas Transportation Code does not specify the same. And a child residing in a mother’s womb is not taking up an extra seat. And with only one occupant taking up a seat, the car did not meet the criteria needed to drive in that lane.”
Bottone went on to fight the ticket with the same argument that fetuses should be counted as passengers and fetuses should be recognized as people in the transportation law, even though deputies told her it would be dismissed.
To show that it wasn’t fair, Bottone stated, “This has my blood boiling. How could this be fair? According to the new law, this is life.”
She will be going to court on July 20.
Souces:https://www.dallasnews.com/news/watchdog/2022/07/08/pregnant-woman-says-her-fetus-should-count-as-a-passenger-in-hov-lanes-she-got-a-ticket/
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/pregnant-texas-woman-says-unborn-baby-count-car-passenger-receiving-ho-rcna37531
The rule for driving in HOVs is you have to have a passenger in the car or two people in the car.
The woman, Brandy Bottone of Plano, was driving on the HOV lane so she could pick up another child earlier. She knew she couldn’t be “a minute late”. A police officer looked inside the car and made her pull over.
With the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which made every fetus a person, Bottone thought her fetus would be counted as a person. She later said, “I pointed to my stomach and said, ‘my baby girl is right here. She is a person.’”
The police officers respond by saying that there has to be “two people outside of the body”. After a little bit of arguing, the police officer said that he didn’t want to “deal with this”, and Bottone received a $215 ticket.
When Amy O’Donnell, a spokeswoman for an anti-abortion group was asked, about the exact same thing, she said, “While the penal code in Texas recognizes an unborn child as a person in our state, the Texas Transportation Code does not specify the same. And a child residing in a mother’s womb is not taking up an extra seat. And with only one occupant taking up a seat, the car did not meet the criteria needed to drive in that lane.”
Bottone went on to fight the ticket with the same argument that fetuses should be counted as passengers and fetuses should be recognized as people in the transportation law, even though deputies told her it would be dismissed.
To show that it wasn’t fair, Bottone stated, “This has my blood boiling. How could this be fair? According to the new law, this is life.”
She will be going to court on July 20.
Souces:https://www.dallasnews.com/news/watchdog/2022/07/08/pregnant-woman-says-her-fetus-should-count-as-a-passenger-in-hov-lanes-she-got-a-ticket/
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/pregnant-texas-woman-says-unborn-baby-count-car-passenger-receiving-ho-rcna37531
