In her book “Fighting for Life,” Live Action President Lila Rose described her first encounter with the reality of abortion.
“One afternoon, I pulled from a lower shelf a small paperback creased from wear and tear and gray with age,” Rose wrote. “On the front cover was an image of a sober-looking woman under the title, A Handbook on Abortion. The book was written by Dr. and Mrs. J.C. Willke, founders of National Right to Life. Inside were pictures. I was not prepared for the images I saw in that book.”
WARNING: Images of abortion victims below.
Rose was very young at the time. “Shocked and horrified, I quickly shut the book and sat back. What did I just see?”
“Feeling I was on the brink of an important discovery, I opened up the book again,” she wrote. “I was staring at the photo of a tiny baby with tiny arms and legs severed from a tiny body. I was looking at a little human being during the first trimester torn into pieces by a powerful suction abortion.”
Handbook on Abortion by Mrs. and Dr. J. C Willke aborted baby first trimester
“Looking back, I realize what a gift it was to experience heartbreak over the evil of abortion as a child. It gave me the drive to start my organization, Live Action, at a young age,” Rose wrote.
Abortion Victim Images Published
“Handbook on Abortion” was originally published in May of 1971. “The book helped popularize the use of [abortion victim] images in campaigns against abortion and later at demonstrations outside abortion clinics,” New York Times columnist and abortion advocate Linda Greenhouse once wrote.
In 1971, Dr. Willke met Dr. Russell Sacco, a urologist from Oregon who shared several slides he had taken of aborted preborn babies. The photographs, including the most famous one later dubbed “Precious Feet,” were from aborted babies given to Dr. Sacco by a pro-life pathologist tasked with destroying the bodies.
“Shortly thereafter, our first edition of Handbook on Abortion was published,” wrote the Willkes in a separate book entitled, “Abortion and the Pro-life Movement and Inside View.”
“Following that, the picture was printed in the Life and Death and Did you Know? brochures, and subsequently in uncounted other pamphlets, flyers, books, etc.,” the Willkes noted.
Precious Feet image in Handbook on Abortion Mrs. and Dr. J. C Willke
Inspired to publish
According to the Willkes, the book’s inspiration came from pro-lifers who had been asking the couple to write something. However, it wasn’t until their eldest daughter, then a college student, urged them to publish the book that they seriously began to work on it.
“Now, look, you’ve got to write the book,” she told the couple. “Write it simply – a question and answer format – with a title like Handbook on Abortion.”
Earlier this year, Marie Willke, daughter of the Willkes, recounted the events in an interview on Slate’s “Slow Burn” program. “It was Christmas of my junior year, and I came home. Everything was decorated, you know, the big Christmas dinner and stockings hung, and it was all the traditions,” she told the outlet. “I said, you know, they’re saying in my classes that abortion is a woman’s right. You can’t force her to carry this child. And, you know, she has a right to control her own body. We don’t make men do anything like this. Why should women pay the penalty? And my parents, I think, were just horrified.”
Marie said her parents quickly defended their pro-life position. “They were like, ‘Well, is that human life? Look at the chromosome count. Can you refute that?’ And I couldn’t,” Marie stated. “‘And what if she’s a blue-eyed blonde and the baby’s a little redheaded boy with freckles? Is that part of her body?’ Of course not. It’s a completely separate person.”
“And I thought, well, that’s a pretty strong argument, you know. And then I would say, you know, well, what about the poor rape victim? And Dad would just look at me and say. ‘So, we’re going to make the child pay the penalty for the crime of the father. Does that sound fair?’ And I would think, ‘well, no, that doesn’t sound fair either,’ you know,” she recounted.
Handbook on Abortion John C Willke
“I said, why don’t you write a little book? Because nobody knows the answers that you know, at least nobody I’m talking to,” said Marie, who ended up transcribing the dictated chapters of the book for her parents.
Marie told Slate that the woman on the front cover of the book was actually her. “I’m sitting there. I’m in a sweater and a miniskirt. I’m holding a Kleenex like I’ve been crying. I’m looking at my dad. You can see the back of his head and he’s holding his stethoscope. And I’m supposed to sit there and look worried, like I’m the girl who needs the abortion, you know?” she told Slate. “So, I thought, ‘I look like death warmed over,’ which was Dad’s plan. And I said, ‘Dad, you can’t use that.'”
Marie recalled that her father said in response, “No, no, it’s perfect. You look like you’re in distress.”
Handbook on Abortion is Published
“Handbook on Abortion” quickly “became as the ‘bible’ of the [pro-life] movement and literally was in the pocket or the purse of every pro-life activist in the 1970’s and 1980’s,” according to the Willkes.
“In a few weeks, 5,000 copies were back-ordered,” they wrote. The book went on to sell 1.5 million copies in the first few years, “two years before the U.S. Supreme Court decision.”
“By the time the Court ruled in 1973 and from then on, distribution of ‘Handbook’ just exploded. We kept revising and updating it until finally in 1985 we lay the revised, revised, revised book aside,” they wrote. The book has been translated into over 20 languages, Dr. Willke said in an interview with Facing Life Now.
The Willkes eventually moved on from “Handbook” to more updated projects including their book entitled, “Abortion Questions & Answers” which they published in 1985 and updated in 2003. In 1997, the couple published “Why Can’t we Love Them Both?”
Dr. Jack Willke has been described by some as the father of the pro-life movement, having founded Cincinnati Right to Life in 1970, and later joining National Right to Life’s board. He later founded the Life Issues Institute in 1991 and served there until his death in 2014. “Dr. Willke, a family doctor and father of six…didn’t pander to any base. Instead, he sought the most effective tools to persuade the skeptical and the unpersuaded,” Linda Greenhouse wrote in tribute.
“There is no one who will go down in history as being more effective in this life-and-death battle than Jack and Barbara Willke,” wrote Bradley Mattes, Executive Director of Life Issues Institute, in response to the news of Barbara’s passing in 2013.
The “Handbook,” while no longer in print, can still be found online.
