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.
[5] Willke worked as a family physician in Cincinnati, Ohio, and was on the staff of the formerly named Providence and Good Samaritan hospitals.
[1] 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.
[7] 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.
[8] 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.
[12][13][14] The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists stated that rape victims had no control over whether they became pregnant, adding that "to suggest otherwise contradicts basic biological truths".
[14] Michael Greene, a professor of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive health at Harvard Medical School, dismissed Willke's claims by saying: "There are no words for this—it is just nuts.