Pregnant woman fights HOV lane ticket in light of Roe ruling

DALLAS (Gray News) - A pregnant woman in Texas plans to fight a ticket for driving in a high-occupancy vehicle lane. She argues that the reversal of Roe v. Wade means her unborn child counts as a passenger.

Brandy Bottone got a $215 ticket after she was stopped at an HOV checkpoint near Dallas on June 29, just days after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

When the sheriff’s deputy asked who else was in the car, she pointed to her stomach, indicating her unborn child. She was 34 weeks pregnant at the time, according to The Washington Post.

“I pointed to my stomach. I was like, ‘Right here.’ And he said, ‘Well, it’s two bodies outside of the body. So, that doesn’t count,’” Bottone told CNN.

Texas’ penal code recognizes an unborn child as a person, but the Texas Transportation Code does not.

“It just didn’t make sense to me why two different laws were not speaking the correct way,” Bottone said.

Bottone tried to tell the deputies that with Roe being overturned, her fetus is now “a living child,” but she says they brushed her off, the Post reports.

“I was kind of in shock. 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 isn’t a baby?’” she told CNN.

Bottone says she is “pro-woman.” She plans to fight the ticket in court July 20.

The fall of Roe put in motion Texas’ trigger law that will ban virtually all abortions in the coming weeks, unless the patient’s life is in danger or if they are at risk of “substantial impairment of a major bodily function,” The Associated Press reports.