On the 29th June, a 34 weeks pregnant mother Brandy Bottone was pulled over and ticketed for driving a lone in the HOV lane. When asked whether their was another passenger in the car, she tells the officer that her unborn child counts as a passenger since Roe vs Wade was overturned and the state can not have it both ways.
Brandy says, she was driving to pick up her son and she couldn’t run late so she decided to take the HOV lane and as she exited, she was pulled over by the police
“I was driving to pick up my son. I knew I couldn’t be a minute late, so I took the HOV [high-occupancy vehicle] lane. As I exited the HOV, there was a checkpoint at the end of the exit. I slammed on my brakes, and I was pulled over by police.
When the police officer heard Battone’s claim of her unborn child as a passenger, the officer reacted by saying that it has to be two people out of the body to be regarded as passenger.
She is later passed on to the next officer who gave her a citation and tells her if she wished to fight it, it will most likely get dropped. But they still gave her the $215 ticket written to cause inconvenience.
This has left Bottone raging as the new law states that her unborn baby is also another life.
Bottone said “I asked Amy O’Donnell, spokeswoman for Texas Alliance for Life, an anti-abortion group, what she thought of this unusual situation.”
Amy O’Donnell replied, “While the penal code in Texas recognizes an unborn child as a person in our state, the Texas Transportation Code does not specify the same. And a child residing in a mother’s womb is not taking up an extra seat. And with only one occupant taking up a seat, the car did not meet the criteria needed to drive in that lane.”
When she also asked the the sheriff department on the matter, they declined to comment on the subject. And now Battone will be having her court hearing on July 20th to fight her ticket.
