A Texas woman is turning the tables on anti-abortion lawmakers after receiving a $215 traffic ticket.
via People:
Brandy Bottone of Plano was 34 weeks pregnant when she told Dallas County Sheriff Department officers that her unborn fetus counts as a passenger and therefore gives her the right to use the carpool lane.
“I pointed to my stomach and said, ‘My baby girl is right here. She is a person,’” Bottone recounted telling the officer when she was pulled over at a checkpoint for driving in the HOV lane on June 29, according to The Dallas Morning News.
She made her point following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn 1973’s Roe v. Wade and the constitutional right to abortion.
Battone said the cop told her the HOV lane requires two passengers, meaning “two people outside of the body.” According to the Texas penal code, the term “‘Individual’ means a human being who is alive, including an unborn child at every stage of gestation from fertilization until birth.”
DSPD did not immediately respond to PEOPLE’s request for comment.
“One officer kind of brushed me off when I mentioned this is a living child, according to everything that’s going on with the overturning of Roe v. Wade,” she continued. “‘So I don’t know why you’re not seeing that,’ I said.
“He was like, ‘I don’t want to deal with this.’ He said, ‘Ma’am, it means two persons outside of the body.’ He waved me on to the next cop who gave me a citation and said, ‘If you fight it, it will most likely get dropped,’” Bottone added.
Bottone claims the ticket was “written to cause inconvenience,” adding: “This has my blood boiling. How could this be fair? According to the new law, this is a life. I know this may fall on deaf ears, but as a woman, this was shocking.”
Her court date is set for July 20, and she said, “I will be fighting it.”
Meanwhile, President Joe Biden has doubled down on his pro-choice support, signing an executive order to ensure access to abortion and the “safety of patients, providers, and third parties” on Friday.
“I’m asking the Justice Department that, much like they did in the Civil Rights era, to do everything in their power to protect these women seeking to invoke their rights,” Biden, 79, said Friday.
Last month’s 6-to-3 ruling reversed nearly 50 years of precedent, giving states the power to pass their own laws around abortion. Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri and South Dakota are among those that have already banned abortion in their states, after putting trigger laws in place that governors enacted following the SCOTUS ruling.
Protests have since erupted around the country, and Biden has spoken out against the ruling, which he called the “realization of an extreme ideology and a tragic error by the Supreme Court.”
The decision comes after the SCOTUS opinion was leaked to Politico in May. A poll conducted by CNN has since found that 66 percent of Americans did not want Roe v. Wade to be overturned.
Texas passed its own highly restrictive anti-abortion law last year. Referred to as the “heartbeat ban,” the legislation prohibits the procedure after a fetal heartbeat can be detected, the earliest being six weeks which is before most people know they are pregnant.
She has a point. Women should take it a step further and start claiming unborn children as dependents on tax returns.
The post Pregnant Woman Contests HOV Ticket by Saying Fetus Is Passenger After Roe v. Wade Decision appeared first on LOVEBSCOTT.
