A pregnant woman who was fined more than $200 for driving in a Texas HOV lane is fighting the ticket since her unborn child should count as a second passenger. Brandy Bottone is 34 weeks pregnant and thinks that if fetuses are to be given personhood status, the law will have to apply the distinction across the board.
- Bottone was pulled over in Dallas. When the officer noted that there was no one else in the car with her, Bottone insisted that there was and pointed out that she was pregnant. “He said, ‘Is there somebody else in the car?’ And, looking around, I said, ‘Yes there is,’ and he said ‘Well, where?’ I pointed at my stomach and I was like, ‘Right here,'” she told CNN.
- The police officer didn’t agree that a pregnant woman is two separate people. While Bottone wasn’t trying to be deliberately obtuse, she did want to make a point. “He said, ‘Well, it’s two bodies outside of the body, so that doesn’t count.’ I was kind of in shock, and I was like, ‘Well, in light of everything that’s happened, and I’m not trying to make a huge political stance here, but do you understand that this is a baby?'” she recalled of the interaction.
- The traffic stop came only days after the US Supreme Court took away the federal right to abortion. Texas, of course, has defined a fetus as a “person” in its penal code and therefore has outright restricted abortion in pretty much every case. Of course, this is simply a method of control and hasn’t been very well thought out.
- If a fetus is a person, that’s going to have a knock-on effect. Despite the fact that a fetus cannot support itself outside the womb and in many cases doesn’t even have a brain or heart, if Conservatives want to play ball, they’ll have to go all the way. As Loni Coombs, a former Los Angeles County prosecutor, points out, there are going to be plenty of legal battles over this very topic in the future. “If we’re talking about a fetus being a person, there’s a lot of other rights that attach to being a person that will be litigated in the courts, such as, does my fetus qualify for a tax deduction? Does my fetus qualify for citizenship? Does my fetus qualify for child support?” she said. “These are all issues that are going to be raised and probably litigated in the courts.”
- The ticketing officer in Bottone’s case wasn’t moved by her argument. She said that the officer “brushed her off” and directed her to another officer to get her ticket. That officer told her that she’d probably get off if she fought it. “That boiled my blood, that not only did I get dismissed and didn’t have a conversation about it, but I also now just wasted my time, and I’m going to have to waste my time July 20 fighting a ticket that I feel I shouldn’t have gotten,” she said.
- Bottone won’t say how she feels about abortion one way or the other. And she shouldn’t have to – that’s not the point. “That’s not really why I made the stance that I did,” she said. “It just didn’t make sense to me why two different laws were not speaking the correct way.”
