15-year old lauded for her right-to-life senate testimony

In most ways, Savannah Duke is a typical 15-year-old. She takes honors classes and sings in the chorus at her middle school, and she swims for the varsity team at Spartanburg’s Dorman High School. She is involved with her youth group at First Baptist Church of North Spartanburg. Like most girls her age, she frets over her complexion and “fitting in and all that junk.”

Indeed, in most ways, Savannah is a typical middle-schooler — but not in every way. Most of her friends, for instance, don’t have to negotiate the social challenges of adolescence with only one leg. Most didn’t battle cancer for the first 16 months of their lives. Most have never testified before a South Carolina Senate subcommittee and passionately defended the rights of the unborn.

When Savannah was a 20-week-old inside her mother’s womb, the doctor told her parents, Wendy and Scott, that their unborn child’s left leg was a quarter of the size of the right and had no knee or foot. The doctor also said the baby had a brain abnormality. The defects probably indicated severe chromosomal or genetic disorders, the doctor said, and he urged the parents to terminate the pregnancy and to “start over.”

“Against our doctor’s advice, and with much fear, we opted not to abort,” Wendy told a panel of South Carolina senators March 18, 2015. Duke was at the State House in Columbia to testify in support of a bill that would ban abortions past 20 weeks based on medical findings that fetuses at that stage of development are capable of feeling pain.

“Ours did not turn out to be a worst-case scenario,” Duke said during her testimony. “Our family is a testament that the sole word of a medical professional does not deem a life invalid.”

Savannah, who was 14, then sat down in front of the legislators. She tested the microphone to make sure it was working, and then, drawing inspiration from Psalm 139, she spoke:

“God created my inmost being. He knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise Him because I am fearfully and wonderfully made. His works are wonderful, and I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from Him when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.

“His eyes saw an unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in His book before any of them came to be. I’m glad my parents chose to save my life.”

On Nov. 10, at the annual meeting of the South Carolina Baptist Convention, Savannah was recognized for her “bold witness and activism in defending the sanctity of every human life” and was presented the E.A. McDowell Award by the convention’s Christian Life and Public Affairs Committee.

The award noted that Savannah’s testimony “was a key turning point in supporting a bill that will protect unborn children from savage and painful abortions at 20-weeks gestational age.”

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