Florida Governor Ron DeSantis raised questions during the first 2024 Republican presidential primary debate when he told a bizarre story claiming that a woman named Penny had survived multiple abortion attempts and was “left in a pan”.
“We’re better than what the Democrats are selling. We are not going to allow abortion all the way up ‘til birth, and we will hold them accountable for their extremism,” Mr DeSantis said on stage on Wednesday.
“I know a lady in Florida named Penny. She survived multiple abortion attempts. She was left discarded in a pan,” he continued.
“Fortunately, her grandmother saved her and brought her to a different hospital.”
The Florida governor didn’t elaborate on the story, but the comment quickly raised eyebrows from political observers, who questioned whether it was accurate.
“The story of Penny found in the pan by DeSantis is ludicrous, and obviously untrue,” Steve Schmidt, one of the founders of the anti-Trump Republican group The Lincoln Project, wrote on X. “It should be looked into by the media.”
“I understand that politicians lie, but DeSantis’s story about ‘Penny,’ a woman he says survived multiple abortion attempts and was rescued from a pan by her grandmother(????), is just such a bizarre and impossible story, it’s stunning that any human is that gullible,” added Jill Filipovic, a writer who covers women’s rights in a post on X.
Penny may be a reference to Miriam “Penny” Hopper, an anti-abortion activist from Michigan who says she was born in 1955 at 23 weeks old, Jezebel reports. (A typical pregnancy lasts about 40 weeks.)
Ms Hooper has long been a vocal anti-abortion activist in Florida – including supporting a slate of anti-abortion bills back in 2013.
Republican presidential candidate, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis participates in the first debate of the GOP primary season— (Getty Images)
“Under the doctor’s orders, I was wrapped in a face towel, discarded on the back porch of the hospital and was left there,” she told WFSU at the time. “My grandmother came down the following day and found me. She was livid. She didn’t expect to walk back there and find a live baby. I weighed 1 lb, 11 ounces.”
She continued: “The doctor told my parents, ‘You don’t want this baby to live. You’ll regret it. It’s going to be blind or mentally brain damaged.’
“My dad desperately didn’t want me to live. I think because it would have been in his face.”
The Independent has contacted Mr DeSantis, and Protect Life Michigan, an advocacy group which prominently featured testimony from Ms Hopper in a 2022 video, for further information.
In modern medicine, late-term abortions are extremely rare, and births of live babies during abortion attempts are rarer still.
Only 1.3 percent of abortions take place after 21 weeks, according to CDC data, and the agency recorded 143 deaths of infants born alive during abortions between 2003 and 2014.
When pregnancies look likely to put pregnant people in extreme danger, or yield infants with terminal diagnoses, the standard of care is more commonly palliative.
“The medical standard is to give hospice type care, not futile medical interventions, when the baby has a terminal diagnosis with no chance of surviving,” Dr Diane Horvath, a Baltimore-based OB-GYN, told USA Today in 2019.
“This is a deeply personal decision, and it allows families to follow their own beliefs and faith traditions.”
