Well, the Tampa Bay Times beat me to it.
So I didn’t watch the GOP mock debate, but apparently DeSantis related an unusual story about a 23-week baby aborted in 1955 and left in a bedpan outside that is still alive and an anti-abortion activist.
That didn’t seem possible given 1950s neonatal care, save a papal-level miracle, but it occurred to me that the birth might be old enough for the birth certificate to be public. I dug around a bit last night because I like archival stuff like this.
Unfortunately, for the purposes of public fact-checking, Florida birth records are sealed for 100 years. Plus, the certificate wouldn’t necessarily be accurate in a sensitive case like this. The TPT’s piece found the same info about the Browder family that I did last night, though they also seem to have found a newspaper clipping or two that reported the birth weight, though not a verification of the term.
A lot of family stories in this vein can be partially legendary. I alternatively debunked and confirmed several things that my grandparents told me while doing the family genealogy. For an example of a more innocent sign-of-the-times kind of story, my grandmother often mentioned that she listed herself as 18 instead of 16 on her marriage certificate; a fact textually confirmed by her presence on an earlier census with an age discrepancy.
I don’t doubt Browder/Hopper was born very premature and the outline of the story is true, but a far more likely scenario that doesn’t contradict the narrative would be that her mother was farther along than 23 weeks.