LANSING, Mich. (Michigan News Source) – At last week’s Republican presidential debate, Republican Florida Governor and 2024 presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, when asked about abortion said, “I believe in a culture of life.” In April, he had signed legislation banning abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. At the debate, DeSantis brought up the name of an abortion survivor named Penny.

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DeSantis said, “What the Democrats are trying to do on this issue is wrong, to allow abortion all the way up to the moment of birth. I know a lady in Florida named Penny. She survived multiple abortion attempts. She was left discarded in a pan. Fortunately, her grandmother saved her and brought her to a different medical facility. We’re better than what the Democrats are selling.”

Right away, Democrats and media outlets tried to discredit DeSantis, calling his story “untrue, “bizarre,” “desperate,” and a “gag for attention.”

But those folks soon found out that “Penny” does exist. Her name is Miriam “Penny” Hopper and she currently resides in Michigan. Her story was told online by Faces of Choice, an organization that gives voice to survivors of abortion. Her story has also been featured in other videos and interviews.

Media outlets have called Hopper’s claim uncorroborated because others in the story have passed away including her parents, grandmother and aunt. In an effort to discredit both DeSantis and Hopper’s account of her own history and possibly to promote their own political views on abortion, the media has looked into records, news reports, interviewed doctors and tried to contact acquaintances of Hopper. Hopper herself has refused all recent media requests.

On November 29, 1955, Hopper says that she was delivered after her mother had been pregnant for about 23 weeks. Her mother went to a hospital in Lakeland, Florida after experiencing bleeding. Hopper told Faces of Choice in a video, “The doctor arrived at the clinic in his pajamas and night shoes. After examining my mother, he listened for a heart beating. He said, ‘I do not hear a heart beating. We are going to have to abort.’”

The doctor also told her parents, “‘You do not want this baby to live. If it lives it will be a burden on you all of your life.’ Before returning home, he looked at the nurse and gave orders to discard the baby dead or alive.”

Hopper, who was born only weighing 1 pound, 11 ounces, was left alone to die.

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Hopper was reportedly wrapped in a towel and left in a bedpan on the back porch of the clinic and that is where her grandmother and Aunt Ruby found her alive the next day. Her grandmother called the police and the baby was rushed to another hospital.

Unearthed newspaper articles corroborate Hopper’s struggle to live after being taken to the second hospital and also describe an accident that happened during a police escort to the hospital. The police vehicle was in a collision with another car in front of the local high school while driving to the Morrell Hospital. No one was hurt and the escort was reportedly resumed at police headquarters.

At the new hospital under the watchful eyes of caring medical staff, Hopper had to fight pneumonia several times and other medical issues. Nurses nicknamed her “Penny” because of the color of her hair. She was in the hospital until March 12, 1956.

Hopper’s father, Charles Wesley Browder Sr., who was a U.S. Army sergeant during World War II, told his daughter before passing away in 2011, “Honey, I don’t know what I’d have done without you.”

In a 2013 interview with Florida radio station WFSU, Hopper said her story was based on what her family had told her about her birth and she went on to say that she had an older brother, and that her father, brought up during the Great Depression, had severe misgivings about having another child.

Hopper said her parents had aborted a child before her, and because of that, she says she believes it was a botched at-home abortion that sent her mother to the hospital while pregnant with her. Hopper says from what she’s been told by her family, the doctor may have tried to abort her again that evening.

Hopper says in the Faces of Choice video, “No matter what circumstances my parents were facing regarding my mother’s pregnancy, I ended up having great parents. I ended up having a great life…” She went on to say, “Life has value and all lives matter.”

Hopper has told her story over the years in support of “born alive” bills to stop parents and doctors from abandoning or killing babies after botched abortion attempts.

Hopper was also part of a Faces of Choice Super Bowl commercial that Fox Sports didn’t allow to air three years ago featuring abortion survivors. The commercial’s theme was, “Can you look me in the eye and tell me that I shouldn’t be alive?” and included abortion survivors of different ages and races.

Michigan News Source contacted Right to Life of Michigan about the Hopper controversy and Legislative Director Genevieve Marnon said, “I am unfamiliar with her case, so I have no comment other than to say that the vast majority of Michiganders do not support extreme late term abortions performed on babies who are capable of survival outside the womb.” She also pointed to two other abortion survivors, Melissa Ohden and Gianna Jessen who are speakers about the issue. Ohden has even founded a network of abortion survivors.

An article in the Philadelphia Inquirer written in 1981 had quoted Dr. Willard Cates, who was the director of “abortion surveillance” at the CDC at the time, as estimating that “400 to 500 abortion live births” occurred every year in the United States. The article stated that the real numbers are “little known” because organized medicine “from fear of public clamor and legal action, treats them more as an embarrassment to be hushed up than a problem to be solved.”

As published by the Charlotte Lozier Institute, an undercover video was released in April of 2013 with a D.C. abortionist admitting he wouldn’t intervene to save an abortion survivor. He said, “usually at this point in your pregnancy, it’s too early to survive, usually. It will expire shortly after birth…it’s all in how vigorously you do things to help a fetus survive at this point.”

Another undercover video that was release in March of 2017 shows a former Planned Parenthood medical director saying that in order to determine whether to provide medical intervention for these babies, “You need to pay attention to who’s in the room.”

The Abortion Survivors Network says that there are currently only ten states in the country who require reporting on born alive abortions and they all have different standards. They estimate that there are about 1,700 abortion survivors born in the United States each year, with 58 of them being in Michigan.

In 2002, the Michigan legislature enacted the “Born Alive Infant Protection Act.” That law is still on the books and it ensures that newborns are afforded all of the rights of legal personhood including life-sustaining treatment or humane comfort care for those too young to survive.

Whether that law remains on the books, as well as other abortion legislation that relates to parental consent, waiting periods, licensing requirements for abortion clinics and many other issues, remains to be seen. Today, in her “What’s Next” speech by Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, she called on the Democratic legislators to pass a revamp of the Reproductive Health Act as soon as they are back to work in September. Democrats have cited many of the leftover abortion restrictions in the state as being“dangerous” and “unnecessary” and say that they block women from getting health care.