Ron DeSantis needed to dodge a debate query a couple of six-week federal abortion ban. So the Florida governor pulled out a private story, one which had not too long ago turn into a part of his pitch to voters on the necessity for higher regulation of abortion rights.

“I know a lady in Florida named Penny,” he mentioned. “She survived multiple abortion attempts. She was left discarded in a pan. Fortunately, her grandmother saved her and brought her to a different hospital.” He then pivoted to assault Democrats for his or her abortion “extremism.”

The jarring anecdote caught the eye of viewers on social media, who speculated that Mr. DeSantis was fabricating the story.

But Penny does exist. Mr. DeSantis’s marketing campaign says the governor has met her. She is Miriam Hopper, who goes by Penny and is an anti-abortion activist who lives in Florida and calls herself an “abortion survivor.”

The particulars of Ms. Hopper’s beginning in 1955 are unimaginable to confirm. But no less than one outstanding obstetrician famous that medical advances and practices had modified so dramatically within the practically seven many years since then that her story had little relevance for the present debate about abortion rights and coverage. At the time of her beginning, abortion was unlawful. Even an tried abortion might have resulted in fines and imprisonment for a supplier.

Ms. Hopper didn’t return a name for remark this week. But she instructed her story in an online video posted by Protect Life Michigan, an anti-abortion advocacy group. The video, a part of a broader marketing campaign, was posted in September 2022 amid a marketing campaign towards a poll initiative that will enshrine abortion rights in Michigan’s Constitution. So-called abortion survivors have been a staple of the anti-abortion motion for years, regularly showing in marketing campaign advertisements and testifying on Capitol Hill in favor of federal abortion bans.

According to Ms. Hopper, her mom sought medical care at a clinic in central Florida in 1955 due to bleeding and different issues. She was 23 weeks pregnant, proper on the outer fringe of when a fetus is taken into account capable of survive exterior the womb. The physician who examined Ms. Hopper’s mom mentioned he couldn’t hear a heartbeat. He induced labor, she mentioned.

“You do not want this baby to live — if it lives, it will be a burden on you all of your life,” Ms. Hopper says the physician instructed her dad and mom earlier than instructing a nurse to discard the infant — “dead or alive.”

Ms. Hopper mentioned she had weighed one pound 11 ounces at her beginning. The nurse “placed me in a bedpan on the back porch of the clinic,” she mentioned. When her grandmother and aunt arrived, they discovered Ms. Hopper. Her grandmother known as the police. A nurse helped take Ms. Hopper to a hospital in Lakeland, Fla., the place she survived a number of bouts of pneumonia.

Ms. Hopper’s mom, aunt, father and grandmother have died. It doesn’t seem that the incident was coated in news studies.

After an prolonged keep, Ms. Hopper went house and had a “great life.” She married her highschool sweetheart, had two kids of her personal and has seven grandchildren. “Life has value, and all lives matter,” she mentioned, on the finish of the video.

In a 2013 interview with the Florida radio station WFSU, carried out in the midst of a statehouse debate over new abortion restrictions, Ms. Hopper mentioned that her story was primarily based on what she had been instructed by her household. She mentioned that her father, raised in the course of the Great Depression, didn’t need one other youngster and that she suspected a botched abortion had despatched her mom to the hospital with the issues.

Diane Horvath, an obstetrician and gynecologist who performs abortions till 34 weeks at a clinic in Maryland, mentioned it was troublesome to parse Ms. Hopper’s account.

“There’s a lot of parts of this story that don’t make sense to me,” she mentioned, noting that 68 years in the past, physicians had lacked the current-day applied sciences to maintain very untimely infants alive.

In the Fifties, demise was “virtually ensured” when an toddler was delivered at or earlier than 24 weeks of gestation, in keeping with a report printed in 2017 by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine.

By distinction, a examine carried out final 12 months by a workforce of neonatologists discovered that nearly 56 percent of infants who’re born at 23 weeks survive — in the event that they obtain aggressive remedy in a neonatal intensive care unit.

Even if Ms. Hopper’s story is correct, it’s not significantly germane to a dialogue of present abortion practices or laws, Dr. Horvath mentioned.

“It doesn’t represent the reality of medical practice at this moment,” she mentioned. “It’s not really relevant to what we should be talking about when we talk about access to abortion.”

Fewer than 1 % of abortions happen after 21 weeks’ gestation, in keeping with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Such procedures are usually troublesome to obtain, with solely a restricted variety of amenities providing them.

The Republican presidential main debate wasn’t the primary time Mr. DeSantis had instructed a model of this story. He debuted the narrative final weekend at a city corridor in Nashua, N.H., amid a shift in his messaging that was meant to evoke a more personal touch.

The second got here in response to a query from a voter who described himself as a “traditional Catholic” and requested Mr. DeSantis, who has signed a six-week abortion ban in Florida and has tried to dodge questions on whether or not he helps the same ban nationwide, how he would “protect the life of the unborn.”

Mr. DeSantis mentioned he had met “Penny” in particular person in central Florida, after which launching into the same model of the story he instructed on Wednesday night time, together with the small print about Ms. Hopper’s grandmother and the pan, and making an attempt to color Democrats because the extremists on abortion.

“You know, that’s a very callous thing to happen,” Mr. DeSantis mentioned. Most Democratic officeholders say the federal government shouldn’t legislate such selections and may go away them to a girl and her physician.

Ryan Tyson, a prime DeSantis marketing campaign adviser, mentioned the governor was making an effort to speak extra in regards to the folks he had encountered on the path. His marketing campaign didn’t present particulars in regards to the circumstances of his assembly with Ms. Hopper.

“He’s out there — he’s meeting people,” Mr. Tyson mentioned in an interview after the talk. “He’s hearing their stories as he gets across the country. And I think that’s why you saw he had a moment there, because it does take a toll on you.”