When the sheriff looked around her car last month, he asked, “Is it just you?”

"No, there’s two of us,’” Bottone said. ‘Well, where’s the other person?’”

Bottone, who was 34 weeks pregnant at the time, pointed to her stomach.

Brandy Bottone argued that the state's penal code recognizes a fetus as a person and that she will fight the $215 ticket in court, which was set for July 20. Right about her due date to have the baby.

Source: Washington Post

A pregnant Texas woman who was ticketed for driving in the HOV lane is arguing that Roe v. Wade being overturned by the Supreme Court means that her fetus counted as a passenger, and that she should not have been cited.

Brandy Bottone was recently driving down Central Expressway in Dallas when she was stopped by a sheriff’s deputy at an HOV checkpoint to see whether there were at least two occupants per vehicle as mandated.

When the sheriff looked around her car last month, she recounted to KXAS that he asked, “Is it just you?”

“And I said, ‘No, there’s two of us,’” Bottone said. “And he said, ‘Well, where’s the other person?’”

Bottone, who was 34 weeks pregnant at the time, pointed to her stomach. Even though she said her “baby girl is right here,” Bottone said one of the deputies she encountered on June 29 told her it had to be “two people outside of the body,” according to the Dallas Morning News, the first to report the story. While the state’s penal code recognizes a fetus as a person, the Texas Transportation Code does not.

“One officer kind of brushed me off when I mentioned this is a living child, according to everything that’s going on with the overturning of Roe v. Wade. ‘So I don’t know why you’re not seeing that,’ I said,” she explained to the newspaper.