She was driving in the carpool lane.
A pregnant woman in Texas has tried to get out of a $215 traffic ticket by claiming that her unborn child was a separate passenger in the carpool lane.
Brandy Bottane was 34 weeks pregnant when she was stopped by Dallas County Sheriff Department officers for using the carpool lane despite being the only person in the car.
Using the overturning of Roe V Wade as her defence, she told officers that going by the new laws, her unborn fetus technically counted 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,'” Brandy told the officer as she was pulled over at the checkpoint for driving in the HOV lane, according to the Dallas Morning News.
She then continued to say that her point was valid due to the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn 1973’s Roe v. Wade and abandon the right to abortion in certain states.
The police officer then told her that the carpool lane requires two passengers, meaning “two people outside of the body.” But in 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.”
Explaining that one officer brushed off her defence, she 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.’
“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.”
Brandy’s court date is set for July 20th and she has said that she “will be fighting it”.
