Penny is real and her last name is Hopper. But DeSantis failed to note key details from her remarkable story: The person who tried to end Penny’s life in the womb was not a doctor or even an illegal abortion provider — it was her father. And his effort to abort his daughter with a coat hanger took place almost two decades before the Supreme Court’s seismic Roe v. Wade decision, which established a woman’s right to an abortion. While DeSantis’ version of Penny’s story honors life and a woman who survived a traumatic beginning, it also reflects the perils of a world where abortion is all but outlawed and women can be forced into dangerous, desperate alternatives.
My father keeps telling me “all the news stations, even the liberal ones are saying X.” Then, when I ask what stations, he’ll say something like “channels 6, 10, and 13.” The problem is that I live in a different area than he does. His “6, 10, 13” are different than my “6, 10, 13.” He doesn’t seem to get that.
And this doesn’t even get into the fact that the “liberal stations” he’s talking about might actually be owned by Sinclair. Or the fact that my father often thinks people agree with him even after they say that they don’t agree. (So he might watch a news report that says “X isn’t actually happening” and come away thinking “this station agrees that X is happening.”)