Florida Governor Ron DeSantis raised questions throughout the first 2024 Republican presidential major debate when he instructed a weird story claiming {that a} lady named Penny had survived a number of abortion makes an attempt and was “left in a pan”.
“We’re higher than what the Democrats are promoting. We should not going to permit abortion all the way in which 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, however the remark shortly raised eyebrows from political observers, who questioned whether or not it was correct.
“The story of Penny found in the pan by DeSantis is ludicrous, and obviously untrue,” Steve Schmidt, one of many 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 author who covers ladies’s rights in a put up on X.
Penny could also be a reference to Miriam “Penny” Hopper, an anti-abortion activist from Michigan who says she was born in 1955 at 23 weeks previous, Jezebel reviews. (A typical being pregnant lasts about 40 weeks.)
Ms Hooper has lengthy been a vocal anti-abortion activist in Florida – together with supporting a slate of anti-abortion payments again in 2013.
Republican presidential candidate, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis participates within the first debate of the GOP major 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 instructed WFSU on 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 additional info.
In fashionable medication, late-term abortions are extraordinarily uncommon, and births of dwell infants throughout abortion makes an attempt are rarer nonetheless.
Only 1.3 p.c of abortions happen after 21 weeks, in line with CDC knowledge, and the company recorded 143 deaths of infants born alive throughout abortions between 2003 and 2014.
When pregnancies look prone to put pregnant individuals in excessive hazard, or yield infants with terminal diagnoses, the usual of care is extra generally 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, instructed USA Today in 2019.
“This is a deeply personal decision, and it allows families to follow their own beliefs and faith traditions.”