Florida woman says she was the abortion survivor that DeSantis brought up at Republican debate 

A Florida woman says she was the abortion survivor name-checked by Sunshine State Gov. Ron DeSantis during last week’s first Republican primary debate after left-wing critics cast doubt on the story.

“I know a lady in Florida named Penny,” DeSantis, 44, said in response to a question about having signed a six-week abortion ban into law. “She survived multiple abortion attempts. She was left discarded in a pan. Fortunately, her grandmother saved her and brought her to a different hospital.”

Miriam “Penny” Hopper, 67, has since come forward to claim she lived despite being subjected to repeated attempts to abort her in 1955 — even being left “in a bedpan on the back porch of the clinic” where her mother tried to terminate the pregnancy after 23 weeks due to complications.

A doctor had been unable to detect a fetal heartbeat and induced the abortion by giving Hopper’s mother a shot, later telling a nurse to “discard the baby dead or alive,” according to Hopper’s own testimony in an ad by pro-life group Faces of Choice.

Hopper’s grandmother and aunt showed up a day later and, finding her still alive, notified police and transferred her to a hospital in Lakeland, Fla., where the nurses nicknamed the baby “Penny” because of her red hair.

“I existed at 23 weeks,” Hopper told Fox News Digital this week. “There are thousands of abortion survivors around the world who have stories to tell, who have miraculous stories to tell.”

Hopper also told the Associated Press: “My parents had always told me all my life, ‘You’re a miracle to be alive.’” She declined to say whether DeSantis’ campaign had been in contact with her.

“I’m not going to get into that because I don’t want to mudsling in politics,” she told the outlet. “This story is about abortion and surviving abortion.”

Contemporary newspaper articles in The Lakeland Ledger and The Tampa Tribune confirm that Hopper did in fact make a rare recovery after being born prematurely, though the details were unclear.

Hopper was also featured in an ad by Faces of Choice which was shown at the 2020 March for Life in Washington, DC.

Critics jumped on DeSantis’ tale during and after the Aug. 23 debate in Milwaukee, with former Republican consultant Steve Schmidt calling it “ludicrous.”

“The story of Penny found in the pan by DeSantis is ludicrous, and obviously untrue,” the Lincoln Project co-founder said on X, formerly known as Twitter. “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,” liberal journalist Jill Filipovic also tweeted.

“My answer to that would be the fact that I did exist,” Hopper told Fox News, adding that it was “exciting” and “shocking” to hear that her story was mentioned at the debate, even though she says she did not watch it.

“You know that you’ve known your story all your life, but you’re not the only one out there to tell a story, that’s got stories to tell,” she told the outlet. “I was very humbled by it.”

NARAL Pro-Choice America denounced DeSantis and the other Republican candidates after the debate in a press release, saying they had stated “blatant abortion lies” in an effort to eventually pass a federal abortion ban.

NARAL did not respond to a request for comment by The Post in response to Hopper’s story.

Hopper is one of roughly 650 members of the Abortion Survivors Network, a group that connects people who were “born alive” after failed abortions.