Physicians for Life

When doctors have become dealers in death, we need to sing the praises of those noble physicians who have taken a courageous stand for the culture of life.

Perhaps there is no better test of the health of a culture than the way that it treats its children. The Canaanites sacrificed their own infants to Moloch; the Carthaginians slaughtered children to Baal; and the Aztecs and Mayans sacrificed children to feed their demonic gods until the Christian conquistadors put an end to the barbarism. Now, in our self-proclaimed “post-Christian” culture, mothers slaughter their own children on the altars erected to their own narcissistic self-empowerment or the narcissistic self-empowerment of their no-strings-attached sexual partners. Whether the name of the god demanding child sacrifice is called Moloch or Mammon or simply Me, its worship is ultimately demonic.

In pagan cultures, the person ordained to practice child sacrifice was a priest; in our own culture, it is a physician. Such physicians scorn the Hippocratic Oath, which all newly-professed doctors once took, in which they promised solemnly to “do no harm or injustice” to their patients. They refute especially these words of the Oath:

Neither will I administer a poison to anybody when asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a course. Similarly I will not give to a woman a pessary to cause abortion. But I will keep pure and holy both my life and my art.

When doctors have become dealers in death, we need to sing the praises of those noble physicians who have taken a courageous stand for the culture of life. We have already sung the praises of Jérôme Lejeune, the French pediatrician and geneticist who discovered that Down syndrome was caused by an extra copy of chromosome 21, and who subsequently campaigned against those who sought to use his discovery to hunt down children with Down syndrome in the womb to exterminate them. Let’s now praise those lesser-known physicians whose faith led them to fight for the culture of life, beginning with John and Evelyn Billings.

An internet search for “John Billings” brings up an American pilot who flew spies behind enemy lines during World War II, as well as a pioneering American librarian. One needs to dig a little deeper to find the “John Billings” who, along with his wife Evelyn, pioneered research into natural family planning. Such relative anonymity belies the acclaim that Dr. Billings received in his long and illustrious career.

Born in Australia, he was elevated to the Fellowship of the Australian College of Physicians and was appointed a member of the Order of Australia on the recommendation of Queen Elizabeth II. He was made Knight Commander of St. Gregory by Pope Paul VI, was honored by John Paul II, and was described as a “noble soul” by Benedict XVI.

This “noble soul” was animated by a belief in the inherent dignity of every human person. “We need to change human hearts,” he said during a speech in India in 1997, “so that the rights of all individuals will be recognized, respected and defended…. All the rights of human persons depend primarily on the fundamental right to life, upon which all other rights can be defined.”

John and Evelyn Billings began their pioneering work in the field of natural family planning in 1953, developing what became known as the Billings Ovulation Method, which was approved by the Catholic Church and adopted by the World Health Organization.

John Billings died in 2007 at the age of eighty-nine; Evelyn died in 2013 at the age of ninety-five. They had married in 1943 and were blessed with nine children, thirty-seven grandchildren, and numerous great-grandchildren. God be praised!

God should also be praised for another married couple, John and Barbara Willke, who are probably responsible for saving the lives of thousands of unborn children. They are widely considered to be the parents of the pro-life movement. Their Handbook on Abortion became an international bestseller, accumulating sales of around 1.5 million copies and being translated into thirty-two languages. A subsequent book, Abortion: Questions and Answers, enjoyed similar global success. As well as authoring other books, they travelled to no fewer than sixty-four countries to deliver the pro-life message and appeared frequently together on television and radio shows.

John C. Willke was a practicing obstetrician in Cincinnati from 1950 until 1988, at which point he retired in order to focus full time on his pro-life work. He was president of National Right to Life, America’s oldest and largest pro-life organization, and he founded the Life Issues Institute.

Widely credited for converting President George H.W. Bush to the pro-life position, Willke’s approach was to employ science to prove the humanity of the unborn child. Having proved the case scientifically, he then called for common sense and common decency to defend unborn humans from the scourge of abortion. “This is a unique being,” he said of the unborn child, “containing within itself a genetic package, completely programmed for and actively moving toward adult human existence.”

John C. Willke died in 2015 at the age of eighty-nine; Barbara predeceased him two years earlier. They spent their mortal lives in defense of life, so we may well believe that they are spending their eternal lives praying for the pro-life cause and for the lives of the unborn. Once again, may God be praised!

The author is indebted to Donald DeMarco, author of Apostles of the Culture of Life, for providing source material for the foregoing.

Republished with gracious permission from Crisis Magazine (September 2024).

This essay is part of a series, Unsung Heroes of Christendom.

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The featured image is “The Doctor” (circa 1933) by Joseph Tomanek, after Luke Fildes, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.