Right to Life of Greater Cincinnati’s annual banquet last month wasn’t a tribute to John and Barbara Willke, but it could have been.

The band played a Johnny Cash song about the fate of mankind on Judgment Day. The emcee praised anti-abortion activists as patriots and derided secular journalists as dishonest. And as everyone headed to the buffet for chicken and roasted potatoes, a Catholic priest led a prayer thanking God for President Donald Trump and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Faith. Country. Media. Politics. All pillars of a movement the Willkes helped build more than 50 years ago at their kitchen table in Cincinnati, where they stuffed envelopes, wrote speeches and hashed out a strategy to abolish abortion in America.

The Willkes, who became a pro-life power couple after founding the nation’s first Right to Life chapter here, are gone now.

But their strategy for winning the abortion war is very much alive among those still in the fight.

At the annual banquet on Oct. 18, more than 600 turned out at the Sharonville Convention Center for the kind of revival-tent celebration the Willkes would have loved. They came to give money, praise God and cheer on a victory they believe is getting closer by the day.

“The idea that we can overturn Roe v. Wade is no longer years away,” said Meg Wittman, Right to Life’s director in Cincinnati.

“Just think about it,” she told the crowd, pausing to let the idea sink in. “It is within our grasp.”

What happens if Roe v. Wade is reversed?:It wouldn't end abortion in America.

Activists on both sides of America’s abortion barricades believe she could be right. Kavanaugh’s arrival at the Supreme Court puts Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision legalizing abortion, in more peril than at any time in the past 45 years.

Whether that threat is met with joy or fear, the importance of the role John and Barbara Willke played in making it possible can’t be understated. They, quite literally, wrote the how-to manual for overturning Roe.

“What they started has grown into something really huge,” said Brad Mattes, a longtime friend and the president of the Life Issues Institute in Cincinnati.

That seemed unlikely in the beginning, almost five decades ago, when no one was certain the Willkes knew what they were doing.

Including the Willkes.

After Roe, the house 'went crazy'

He was a doctor, she was a nurse. They were raising six kids on Cincinnati’s West Side while trying to run John’s family medical practice.

As devout Catholics, they’d spent what little spare time they had lecturing around the country on sex education from the church’s perspective, focusing on love, marriage and the immorality of contraception.

When a priest asked them in 1970 to expand their lectures to abortion, the Willkes said no.

“We’re not about to open that one,” John Willke recalled saying, years later. “If we start talking about abortion, it will swallow us up.”

Three years later, Roe v. Wade happened. The ruling stunned the Willkes. They saw it as a sign the culture was changing, tragically, in their view, and they had to act.

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They turned their kitchen into a war room. In the morning, their children ate cereal at a table covered with photos of fetuses in various stages of development and with notes for their parents’ next lecture, which now focused entirely on abortion. At night, the Willkes huddled around the same table for hours, talking strategy, planning their next move.

Their oldest daughter, Marie Meyers, remembers the phone ringing constantly, visitors in and out of the house, strangers sleeping on the couch.

It had taken over their lives. It was swallowing them up.

“Our house went crazy,” Meyers said. “It was a seat-of-the-pants operation.”

For years, throughout the 1970s and most of the 1980s, the Willkes failed more than they succeeded.

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Right to Life and other groups challenged Roe v. Wade in court and lost case after case. Judges generally considered the matter settled law: Abortion was legal, and states couldn’t restrict a woman’s right to have one.

Angry anti-abortion activists took to the streets. They blocked clinic entrances, chained themselves to doors and harassed patients. Some turned violent, shooting doctors and firebombing clinics, including Planned Parenthood’s clinic in Cincinnati.

“It was a really scary time,” said Toni Van Pelt, president of the National Organization for Women.

Al Gerhardstein, a Planned Parenthood lawyer, was running to court constantly in those days, seeking protective orders from judges to keep clinics open. “It was all about finding out how far they could go in interfering with a woman’s right to choose,” he said of the protests.

Like many of the protesters, the Willkes objected to abortion on religious grounds. They considered it an evil act, the ending of a life. But unlike many of them, the Willkes were pragmatists.

They opposed violence at clinics and said it was unrealistic to seek an outright ban on abortion so soon after Roe. It’s OK to be angry, they said, but be patient, too.

“We’re not going to win in giant steps,” Barbara Willke told The Enquirer in the 1990s, explaining the strategy following the Roe decision. “We’re going to win in small steps.”

The first step was changing the abortion debate itself. The Willkes realized the “right to choose” slogan had been effective for the abortion rights side, so they set out to find a forceful counter argument.

They launched an ad campaign, mostly from photos and drawings assembled at their kitchen table. It was low budget but high volume. Billboards and bumper stickers featuring smiling babies soon became ubiquitous on America’s highways.

Choose life. Abortion stops a beating heart. Real feminists are pro-life.

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Then the Willkes did what they did best. They created a lecture series based in part on their Handbook on Abortion, a question-and-answer book filled with advice for those trying to win converts to the pro-life cause.

They’d written the book in 1971 when Meyers, their daughter, told them she needed more information to argue with pro-choice students she’d met in college. She bought her parents a Dictaphone and promised to type up whatever they had to say.

“There wasn’t anything like it,” Meyers said. “Dad was a master with words. He could cut right through in simple language, so everyone could understand.”

The first printing was 5,000 copies, but sales exploded after Roe v. Wade. It's since sold more than 1 million copies.

The book and lectures made the Willkes the friendly faces and calm voices of a cause that had not always been viewed as friendly or calm. They appeared on so many TV and radio shows that friends started calling them the “mother and father of the pro-life movement.”

But they weren’t exactly Ward and June Cleaver. Their message may have been delivered coolly, but it was, in many ways, just as strident as those heard on the streets outside abortion clinics.

They used words such as “kill” and “murder” and “slaughter” when referring to abortion. They described clinics as “abortion mills” participating in a “holocaust.” They compared the work of clinic doctors to that of the Nazis.

Their lectures, delivered in the matter-of-fact tone of a college professor, included slideshows of aborted fetuses in buckets and garbage cans.

They also weren’t above the occasional publicity stunt. On The Phil Donahue Show, John Willke, known to his friends as Jack, shocked the host and the audience by taking a preserved human fetus out of a bottle and holding it up to the camera, wiggling its tiny arm with his index finger.

“There was pandemonium,” the Willkes recalled in their book, "Abortion and the Pro-Life Movement." “Phil, for once in his career, was speechless.”

Politics, patriotism and abortion

Taking on talk show hosts was great theater, but the Willkes knew they’d have to broaden their campaign if they were serious about overturning Roe.

They and others at Right to Life set about making the group a political player.

The organization began publishing “pro-life ballots” to endorse candidates up and down the ballot, from President of the United States to county auditor. More important, it created a political action committee to raise money for them.

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It didn’t matter whether the candidates would, if elected, have the power to do anything about abortion, only that they were willing to pick a side in the fight.

In the Willkes’ view, this was no small thing. It made abortion a campaign issue in every election, local or national. It forced people to think about abortion every time they cast a ballot.

“We’d identify and turn out pro-life voters,” Mattes said. “The movement’s strengths are in the grassroots.”

Winning elections mattered for two reasons: First, those elected to Congress or legislatures could make laws restricting abortion. Second, elected or appointed judges could uphold those new laws, pecking away at Roe v. Wade.

More:Fight over abortion comes to Oregon as Republicans target reproductive rights in U.S.

To win support from the courts and lawmakers, the Willkes moved beyond the argument closest to their hearts. Religion alone would not carry the day, they decided, so they started talking more about “human rights” and “civil rights.”

They modeled their approach on 19th Century abolitionists who had argued for years that slaves should be considered people, not property. In this view, the fetus was the person in need of constitutional protection.

Abortion wasn’t just anti-God, they said. It was anti-American.

Over time, the strategy paid off. Republican candidates embraced the cause and made pro-lifers a crucial part of their base. In turn, they appointed like-minded judges sympathetic to the anti-abortion side.

Court victories soon followed. Waiting periods, parental consent laws, mandatory ultrasounds, new licensing rules. Anything that made abortions harder to get.

If the Willkes found something worked in one state, they’d try it in another and another, sometimes helping to write the bills lawmakers would introduce.

Gerhardstein, the Planned Parenthood lawyer, watched the changing landscape the way a general might watch his troops being chased from the battlefield. He didn’t like what the Willkes were doing, but he had a grudging respect for the way they were doing it.

“The Willkes were never part of the strategy to get in your face and grab you and violently declare war,” Gerhardstein said. “They were in Columbus. They were lobbying the state legislature.”

The work was demanding, keeping the Willkes on the road for days or weeks at a time. Meyers said she often had to sign permission slips and check homework for her younger siblings because her parents were away so much.

“I did my best, but I’m sure they missed their parents,” Meyers said. “I don’t think anyone would begrudge it, but they were gone a lot. It was a sacrifice.”

Mattes said the Willkes felt they’d become so identified with the movement it was difficult to turn the job over to others. People expected things of them.

Those expectations included meeting with leaders they hoped to win over, such as Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, who declared themselves “pro-life” while running for president.

Mattes said John Willke spent four hours with Bush at the then-candidate’s summer home in Kennebunkport, Maine, before the 1988 election, trying to lock in his support with the same lecture and slide show he and Barbara had done for years.

To opponents, the Willkes’ traveling lectures looked like propaganda. They accused them of lying, doctoring photos and using junk science to cover for the weaknesses in their case against legalized abortion.

The Willkes’ most notorious claim was that women were unlikely to get pregnant during what they called an “assault rape,” because the female body shuts down its reproductive system when under stress. “The tubes are spastic,” John Willke told The New York Times.

The theory, refuted by experts on reproduction, appealed to anti-abortion activists who didn’t want to include a rape exception in a future abortion ban.

Van Pelt said ideas like that send a clear message: “They don’t care about women.”

A Supreme Court battle looms

Meyers said no one who knew her parents would ever say such a thing.

Young pregnant women stayed in her house all the time while she was growing up, she said. Some had been put out by their parents, others by boyfriends. But always, she said, they found an open door at the Willke house.

“We had pregnant women in our house all the time,” Meyers said. “You can’t just say to a girl, you have to have this baby. You have to help them.”

Abortion rights advocates have said that’s all well and good, but not every woman seeking an abortion has a place to go, or even feels she needs to go anywhere. She just wants to make the most personal of decisions on her own. She wants to choose.

Van Pelt said she’s not sure how much longer that option will be available, given the current makeup of the Supreme Court. Already, she said, new laws championed by the Willkes have restricted access to abortion across the country.

Ohio now has 17 measures that limit abortion and nine remaining clinics, down from 14 in 2013. About 40 percent of women in the United States now live in a county without an abortion clinic.

“They’ve been setting this up for a long time,” Van Pelt said of the looming court battles. “I don’t know where we’re headed.”

Mattes said the Willkes knew. He said his friends saw how the battle would play out decades ago and they worked for more than half their lives to win it.

More:Abortion rights: Supreme Court considers overruling several lesser precedents. Could Roe v. Wade be affected?

It didn’t matter that their work failed to significantly move public opinion: A Pew Research Center poll this year found 58 percent of Americans thought abortion should be legal in all or most cases, compared to 60 percent in 1995.

What mattered was they moved the opinion of the voters, politicians and judges who could change laws and, ultimately, challenge Roe v. Wade. They identified their target audience and created a political and cultural force.

As Mattes watched Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings on TV last month, he thought of the early days of the movement and the anger and frustration so many abortion foes felt after the Roe decision.

He saw that same anger in the resistance to Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination. He saw it in the accusations against Kavanaugh, the tough questions from Democratic senators, the protests in the street.

Mattes thought he knew why they were so upset. It wasn’t the allegations of sexual assault against him, Mattes said, it was the threat his nomination posed to abortion rights.

Soon, Roe v. Wade could be history.

“That time is coming,” Mattes said. “If it does, we’ll be standing on the shoulders of Jack and Barbara Willke.”

More:Abortion cases are heading toward the Supreme Court. Can the justices avoid them for long?

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