A pregnant woman has turned the tables on anti-abortion lawmakers in Texas after being cited for a $275 traffic ticket.
As reported by The New York Post, Brandy Bottone from Plano, Texas, says she was stopped at a sheriff’s checkpoint targeting high-occupancy vehicle lane (HOV) drivers flouting the rules.
By law, in order to be legally accepted in the lanes, at least one passenger must be in the car accompanying the driver.
Bottone says she was driving down Central Expressway approaching the exit for I-635 when she was stopped by an officer.
Check out Bottone's appearance on KXAS:Speaking to NBC 5 News, she said: "[The officer] starts peeking around. He's like, 'Is it just you?' And I said, 'No there's two of us?'"
"And he said, 'Well where's the other person.' And I went, 'right here,'” pointing to her stomach," the mom-to-be added.
However, despite being 34 weeks pregnant at the time of the stop, the officer told her that her unborn child did not count as another passenger.
Referencing the Supreme Court's recent decision to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision - allowing many states, including Texas, to introduce more restrictive abortion laws - Bottone said: "And then I said, 'Well [I'm] not trying to throw a political mix here, but with everything going on [with Roe v. Wade], this counts as a baby.'"
"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 told The Dallas Morning News.
Despite her best efforts, she was hit with a $275 ticket - a fine she now plans to fight in court.
PEOPLE reports that, 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."
"This has my blood boiling," Bottone says. "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."
Bottone's court date is currently set for July 20.
Dallas appellate lawyer Chad Ruback says we're un "uncharted" political and legal territory now, and that there's no clear answer in this instance.
Last year, Texas passed a bill commonly referred to as "the Heartbeat Ban", which prohibits abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected. In most cases, this is around six weeks - a timeframe that many argue to too soon for many women to know they are pregnant.
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