Dr. John C. Willke, an obstetrician who helped establish the
modern anti-abortion movement — and whose idea that rape victims could resist
conception was widely challenged — died on Friday at his home in Cincinnati. He
was 89.
His daughter Marie Meyers confirmed the death.
Dr. Willke was a former president of the National Right to
Life Committee, the nation’s oldest and largest anti-abortion organization. He
and his wife, Barbara, a nurse, founded Right to Life of Greater Cincinnati in
the early 1970s and lobbied against Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling
that legalized abortion. They supported peaceful protests at abortion clinics
across the country and spoke out against the use of violence in the name of
their cause.
“They knew how to effectively and instinctively communicate”
their message, said Bradley Mattes, chief executive and a founding partner with
Dr. Willke of the Life Issues Institute, which describes itself as “serving the
educational needs of the pro-life movement.”
For decades, Dr. Willke had a busy practice as a family
doctor but, to protest abortion, quit delivering babies in the late 1960s. He
retired from his medical practice in 1988 to devote more time to the
anti-abortion movement, participating in protests and testifying at
congressional hearings. He and his wife, who died in 2013, began writing and
lecturing on sex education at the behest of their daughters — who, Mrs. Willke
told The Associated Press in 1999, said they had received little formal
education in college on issues related to sex.
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| Dr. John C. Willke, shown in 2011, wrote and lectured with his wife, Barbara, a nurse. Credit Andrew Spear for The New York Times |
“My husband said if we got involved it would swallow us up,”
she said, “and I guess it did.”
Many doctors and abortion rights leaders said some of the
findings that the Willkes presented lacked scientific evidence.
In 1971, the couple wrote “Handbook on Abortion,” which sold
an estimated 1.5 million copies and became a touchstone for the anti-abortion
movement. The book asserted that pregnancies from rape could be avoided “for
all practical purposes.” They later expanded on that notion after a report in
The New England Journal of Medicine suggested that rape victims typically
experience a level of shock that prevents their bodies from functioning
normally.
In a 1999 newsletter of the Life Issues Institute, Dr.
Willke wrote: “There’s no greater emotional trauma that can be experienced by a
woman than an assault rape. This can radically upset her possibility of
ovulation, fertilization, implantation and even nurturing of a pregnancy.”
His theory became prominent news in 2012 when Representative
Todd Akin, a Republican from Missouri, said in an interview that women who are
victims of “legitimate rape” rarely become pregnant because “the female body
has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” Mr. Akin’s statement was
roundly condemned, but Dr. Willke supported it.
“This is a traumatic thing — she’s, shall we say, she’s
uptight,” Dr. Willke said in an interview with The New York Times. “She is
frightened, tight, and so on. And sperm, if deposited in her vagina, are less
likely to be able to fertilize. The tubes are spastic.”
Several experts said there was no reliable data to support
Dr. Willke’s claim. In 2012, the American Congress of Obstetricians and
Gynecologists said the assertion “contradicts basic biological truths.”
John Charles Willke, known as Jack, was born on April 5,
1925, in Maria Stein, Ohio. He graduated from the University of Cincinnati
medical school in 1948. In addition to Ms. Meyers, he is survived by two other
daughters, Theresa Wilka and Anne Millea; three sons, Charles, Joseph and
Timothy; 22 grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
The final book he and his wife wrote together, “Abortion and
the Pro-Life Movement: An Inside View,” an autobiographical account that
compiles their lectures and many of their theories, was published last year.
Dr. Willke remained outspoken to the end. After a 2000
Supreme Court decision striking down Nebraska’s ban on late-term abortions, he
called the move a “high-water mark for abortion.”
“We have moved beyond abortion to killing children who are
entirely born,” he said in an interview with The Cincinnati Enquirer. “As this
becomes more known to the average citizen,” he predicted, “it will ignite a
slowly increasing outrage.”
Mr. Mattes, who worked with Dr. Willke for more than two
decades, said that although the doctor and his wife were sometimes seen as
prudish, they were actually pragmatic. “They were not opposed to sex,” Mr.
Mattes said. “They just saw an injustice in society.”
