A pregnant Texas woman fined for driving alone in a carpool lane said her fetus must be counted as a passenger under tough new abortion laws.
Brandy Bottone, 32 and 34 weeks pregnant, has vowed to go to court after being pulled over and fined by a police officer in Dallas last month.
She was driving in a lane reserved for vehicles carrying at least two people — a fact she did not dispute.
But Bottone told a police officer that her unborn child was a person in the eyes of the law because days earlier the United States Supreme Court overturned a decades-old federal law guaranteeing women access to abortion.
“He said, ‘Is anyone else in the car?'” Bottone told CNN on Sunday.
“I pointed to my stomach and said, ‘Right here,'” she recalled.
When the cop said pregnancy “doesn’t count” as the two people would have to be “out of the body,” Bottone insisted “this is a baby.”
The Texas penal code, like that of many conservative states, recognizes a fetus as a “person”, but this does not appear to apply to laws governing transportation.
Even before Roe v Wade was repealed last month, a new Texas law had banned almost all abortions after six weeks — before many women even know they’re pregnant.
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