John Charles Willke (April 5, 1925 – February 20, 2015) was an American author, physician, and anti-abortion activist. He served as president of National Right to Life and, along with his wife Barbara, authored a number of books on abortion and human sexuality. Willke was a leading promoter of the false claim that women's bodies resist pregnancy from forcible rape, an idea which continues to be promoted by some anti-abortion politicians. Life and career Willke was born in Maria Stein, Ohio, the son of Marie Margaret (Wuennemann) and Gerald Thomas Willke. He graduated from Roger Bacon High School in 1942 and earned his M.D. from the University of Cincinnati in 1948. In 1948, he married Babara Hiltz, a nurse. Willke worked as a family physician in Cincinnati, Ohio, and was on the staff of the formerly named Providence and Good Samaritan hospitals. He stopped practicing medicine in 1988 in order to devote himself full-time to the anti-abortion movement. In the 1950s and 60s, Willke and his wife taught abstinence-only sex education courses for the Catholic Church and became increasingly concerned by the abortion-rights movement. In the early 1970s, he founded Right to Life of Greater Cincinnati along with his wife to lobby against Roe v. Wade. In 1971, Willke and his wife wrote Handbook on Abortion, which sold over a million copies and was influential in the anti-abortion movement. Willke's use of graphic photography pioneered its prominence in anti-abortion materials. The book promoted the false belief that rape could not result in pregnancy, and claimed that women often fabricated accusations of rape. In 1980, he became president of National Right to Life, the nation's oldest and largest anti-abortion organization. In the 1990s, Willke shifted the focus of his arguments away from fetal personhood and instead sought to present the anti-abortion movement as "compassionate to women", in response to opinion polling and test marketing which convinced him that this would be a more effective strategy. Views on pregnancy via rape Willke was a proponent of the concept that female rape victims have physiologic defenses against pregnancy, and thus that women rarely become pregnant after a sexual assault. Willke wrote in Christian Life Resources in 1999: "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". Willke claimed that for