https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2021/10/04/todd-akin-republican-missouri-dead/

By Annabelle Timsit
Today at 4:55 a.m. EDT

Former congressman Todd Akin (R-Mo.), who famously lost a 2012 Senate bid after he expressed controversial views about abortion in cases of “legitimate rape,” died late Sunday, the Associated Press reported, citing a statement from Akin’s son Perry. He was 74.

The cause of death was not immediately available but his son said that he had suffered from cancer for years.

“He was a devote Christian, a great father, and a friend to many,” Perry Akin told the AP. “We cherish many fond memories from him driving the tractor at our annual hayride, to his riveting delivery of the freedom story at 4th of July parties dressed in the full uniform of a colonial minuteman. The family is thankful for his legacy: a man with a servant’s heart who stood for truth.”
As a politician, Mr. Akin was prone to making controversial comments. He was best known for an unsuccessful run for the U.S. Senate in 2012, during which he sparked a national backlash for a statement about abortion that derailed his campaign.

When asked by St. Louis television station KTVI to explain his no-exceptions policy on abortions, Mr. Akin first said that pregnancies arising from rape are “really rare,” and added, “if it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

Mr. Akin first backtracked and later apologized for his comment in a television ad that framed his comment as a slip of the tongue.

But in 2014, he walked back his apology in his book, “Firing Back: Taking on the Party Bosses and Media Elite to Protect Our Faith and Freedom..”
“By asking the public at large for forgiveness,” Mr. Akin wrote, “I was validating the willful misinterpretation of what I had said.”

Mr. Akin refused to bow out of the race and eventually lost to incumbent Democrat Claire McCaskill, who went on to represent Missouri in the U.S. Senate until 2018, when she lost her reelection bid to Josh Hawley (R), the state’s attorney general.

William Todd Akin was born in New York City in 1947 but grew up in St. Louis. He attended Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts and served as an Army Combat Engineer from 1971 to 1980. After a few years in the private sector, Akin was elected to the Missouri House of Representatives in 1988, where he served until after he was elected to Congress in 2000.
He served on the board of the Mission Gate Prison Ministry and was involved with the Boy Scouts of America and the antiabortion group Missouri Right to Life.

Mr. Akin had 18 grandchildren and six children and is survived by his wife, Lulli, and his mother, Nancy.