Comment A pregnant woman from Texas who was ticketed for driving in the HOV lane suggested this Roe v. Wade The reversal by the Supreme Court means her fetus counts as a passenger and should not have been reported. Brandy Bottone was recently driving on the Central Expressway in Dallas when she was stopped by a sheriff’s deputy at an HOV checkpoint to see if there were at least two passengers per vehicle as mandated. When the sheriff looked around her car last month, she told The Washington Post he asked, “Is it just you or is someone else driving with you?” “I said, ‘Oh, there’s two of us,’” Bottone said. “And he said, ‘Where?’ Bottone, who was 34 weeks pregnant at the time, showed off her stomach. Although she said her “baby girl is right here,” Bottone said one of the deputies she met with on June 29 told her she should be “two bodies out of the body.” While the state’s criminal code recognizes a fetus as a person, the Texas Transportation Code does not. “An officer let me down when I mentioned that he’s a live kid, according to everything that’s going on with the tipping Roe v. Wade. ‘So I don’t know why you’re not seeing this,’ I said,” he explained to the Dallas Morning News, which first reported the story. Bottone received a $215 ticket for driving alone in the lane of two or more passengers — a citation she told local media she would challenge in court this month. “I’m going to fight it,” Bottone, 32, of Plano, Texas, told The Post. While the Texas Department of Transportation has not said whether it is considering changing the transit code, Bottone’s case may move the state into “uncharted territory” after the June 24 ruling Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health OrganizationDallas-based appellate attorney Chad Ruback told The Washington Post. “I find her argument creative, but I don’t believe based on the current course of the Texas Transportation Code that her argument is likely to succeed in an appellate court,” he said. “That being said, it is entirely possible that she could find a trial court judge who would reward her for her creativity.” Ruback added, “This is a very unique situation in American jurisprudence.” Representatives for the Dallas County Sheriff’s Department and the Texas Department of Transportation did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The news comes as all corners of the country grapple with the fallout from the Supreme Court ruling more than two weeks ago. President Biden delivered an emotional speech on Friday, announcing a series of steps aimed at strengthening abortion rights, responding to growing demands from activists to take bolder and more assertive action. Biden’s signing of an executive order to boost access to reproductive health care services was a move generally welcomed by abortion activists, many saying it would likely do little for women in states where abortion is banned. The president acknowledged the limits of his executive powers, saying that Dobbs The decision was “the terrible, extreme and, I think, so completely wrong decision of the Supreme Court”. “What we’re watching was not a constitutional crisis,” Biden said. “It was an exercise of brute political power.” Biden, with fiery speech, announces action on abortion rights Texas is among 13 states that had “trigger bans” designed to take effect once Roe repealed, banning abortions within 30 days of the decision. This Texas teenager wanted an abortion. Now she has twins. It’s the nearly century-old abortion ban in Texas that was ruled unconstitutional Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationwide. After the overthrow of the Supreme Court Roe On June 24, in a 5-4 decision, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) announced that prosecutors could now enforce the 1925 law, which he described as “100% good law” on Twitter. Abortion rights groups and clinics sued, arguing that it should be construed as repealed and unenforceable. A judge in Harris County, Texas issued a temporary injunction last month to allow clinics to offer abortions for at least two weeks without criminal prosecution. Judge Christine Weems (D) ruled that pre-Roe The ban imposed by Paxton and prosecutors “would inevitably and irreparably weaken the provision of abortions in the crucial final weeks in which the safest abortion care remains available and legal in Texas.” But the Texas Supreme Court granted an “emergency motion for temporary relief” of Weems’ ruling last week after Paxton sought the order. Texas Supreme Court Blocks Decision That Allowed Reopening of Abortions Five days after Dobbs According to the decision, Bottone said she was in a hurry to pick up her 6-year-old son and decided to drive her GMC Yukon into the HOV lane since she “couldn’t be late one minute.” While trying to argue that the fetus was her second passenger, Bottone told the Post that the deputy was not open to the conversation. “I thought it was weird and I said, ‘With everything that’s going on, especially in Texas, this counts as a baby,’” she said. “He kind of waved at me and said, ‘This officer will take care of you.’ Bottone said that while one of the deputies told her the ticket would likely be dropped if she fought it, she is upset that the citation was issued in the first place. “I thought it was a waste of my time. It just rubbed me the wrong way,” he said. “I don’t think it was right.” Bottone emphasized that while she believes women should have a choice about what they do with their bodies, “that doesn’t mean I’m pro-choice.” She noted that she also drove in the HOV lane when she was pregnant with her first child, her 6-year-old son. Ruback told The Post he doesn’t know if Texas or other states would consider such a change in their transportation codes. “It’s entirely possible that Brandy could ask her representatives in the legislature to make that change, but I haven’t heard about that if it happened,” said Ruback, who is not involved in her case. “My impression is that I think she would be happy to get out of her traffic ticket. Again, these are unusual times we live in, that’s for sure.” Bottone told The Post that she hoped Texas laws would be consistent in how measures recognize unborn children. “The laws don’t speak the same language and it was all kind of confusing, frankly,” he said. She will appear in court on July 20, which is just two weeks before her daughter’s August 3 due date. “It wasn’t because of Roe v. Wade that I jumped in the HOV lane,” he said. “I just thought of it as me and one other person.” Matt Viser, Caroline Kitchener and Adela Suliman contributed to this report.
