Fetuses in HOV Lanes, Abortions at Sea, and More Post-Dobbs Weirdness

Floating abortion clinics. Fetuses as carpool-lane passengers. Abortion restrictions as a public health emergency. The weird new world of post-Roe reproductive rights continues to deliver murky new battles and quandaries.

A pregnant Plano, Texas, woman argues that she has a right to drive in a highway lane reserved for vehicles with two or more passengers. At 34 weeks pregnant, Brandy Bottone was pulled over by police while driving in a high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lane on Interstate 75 South. When asked if there was anyone else in the car, Bottone pointed to her stomach and said “my baby girl,” she told The Dallas Morning News:

“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.

“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.’

“But they still gave me a ticket. So my $215 ticket was written to cause inconvenience?

“This has my blood boiling. How could this be fair? According to the new law, this is a life.

Bottone said she will be fighting the citation in court.

Her situation hints at how all sorts of existing rules could change—or at least be challenged—when the legal definition of personhood changes.

Meanwhile, plans for a new business off the coast of Alabama challenges traditional notions of what an abortion clinic looks like—and offers an ingenious solution for people trying to keep reproductive freedom alive in the South.

The doctor behind Protecting Reproductive Rights of Women Endangered by State Statutes (PRROWESS) wants to offer surgical abortions from a boat. Meg Autry told a San Francisco NBC affiliate that with many southern states severely restricting or banning abortion, residents of these states are closer to the coast than to a state with legal abortion. Traveling to floating abortion clinics could be cheaper than traveling across several states.

Autry and her team are likely to face legal challenges from states with abortion bans, who may target transportation to the ship or advertising of its services, among other things. But operating in federal waters would allow them to skirt state abortion bans. More:

She explained that this ship will operate on federal waters—nine miles from the coast of Texas and three from the coast of Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi—where it can evade those states’ abortion restrictions. PRROWESS will arrange for patients to be transported to the ship, which will vary depending on where they are coming from, once they pass a pre-screening process.

Autry and a team of licensed medical professionals will offer surgical abortions for up to 14 weeks of pregnancy. The PRROWESS team would also offer other point-of-care gynecological services such as testing and treatment for sexually transmitted infections.

“The project is being funded with philanthropy and the patients care is on a needs basis, so most individuals will pay little to nothing for services,” Autry said.

In contrast to this free-market solution to protecting abortion access, President Joe Biden is mulling plans to declare a public health emergency over abortion restrictions. “Such a move has been pushed by advocates, but White House officials have questioned both its legality and effectiveness, and noted it would almost certainly face legal challenges,” notes Politico.

The idea sh