Nothing good comes of this. Please stop.
When a pregnant North Texas woman was pulled over for driving alone in a high-occupancy vehicle lane, she protested.
“I just felt that there were two of us in [the car] and I was wrongly getting ticketed,” the driver, Brandy Bottone, told The Dallas Morning News in July.
Bottone argued that under Texas’ abortion laws, which went into effect after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion, a fetus is considered a living being. She argued the same should be true when it comes to the state’s traffic laws.
“I’m not trying to make a political stance here,” Bottone said, “but in light of everything that is happening, this is a baby.”
Dallas County officials are now facing unprecedented legal questions about what defines “personhood.” While the district attorney’s office dismissed Bottone’s first citation, she was ticketed a second time in August.
Legal experts, meanwhile, warn that this traffic incident is just a small piece of a larger puzzle considering what it means to treat a fetus the same as a person. Debates about “fetal personhood” have been happening nationwide since the 1960s, when many abortion opponents started championing the idea. In Texas, abortion opponents are divided over whether a fetal personhood law is worth pursuing. But the concept is gaining traction nationwide and could become increasingly salient in Texas, where nearly all abortions have been banned and fetuses already have some legal rights.
“Historically, conversations about fetal personhood have been about introducing increasingly harsh penalties for people who either perform abortions or ‘aid and abet’ abortions,” said Mary Ziegler, a legal historian focusing on abortion at University of California Davis School of Law. “That isn’t the only way you can think about personhood.”
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Kimberley Harris, who teaches constitutional law with an emphasis on reproductive rights at Texas Tech University School of Law, warns that the ultimate impact of fetal personhood laws would be to regulate the decisions of pregnant people.
“If the fetus is now a person,” Harris said, someone who consumes alcohol while pregnant “could be guilty of child endangerment.
“You could potentially be guilty of manslaughter or murder if you had a miscarriage and weren’t taking proper precautions,” she said.
Already, such cases are underway in states like Alabama, where voters have adopted a constitutional amendment protecting fetal rights. The state can legally sentence women to up to 99 years in prison for using drugs during pregnancy and then miscarrying. At least 20 women in the state have faced the harshest possible criminal charges for using drugs and then suffering pregnancy loss, The Marshall Project reported.
Rebecca Kluchin, a reproductive health historian at California State University, Sacramento, said that fetal personhood laws hark back to the era of forced sterilization, when states could forcibly sterilize people deemed unfit to procreate. She said that if fetal personhood is more widely recognized, more women could be forced to undergo unwanted medical interventions, such as cesarean sections, if a doctor believes that treatment is in the interest of the fetus.
“A doctor can say, ‘You need this to save your fetus,’ and it doesn’t matter what you want,” Kluchin explained. “And that takes women’s ability to consent out.”
Brandy Bottone has now made this argument that she can legally drive in the HOV lane all by her pregnant self twice. She says she’s not trying to be political, but that’s naive bordering on contemptuous at this point. Please stay out of the HOV lane until your baby is actually born.