Even in our epoch of instant cancel culture, the 2012 verbal self-immolation of Missouri Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin, by way of one brief, ill-advised phrase, still resonates for its swift, brutal, and decisive outcome. A close race against the one-term Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill was lost by 15 points on Election Day. And when Akin died of cancer last week in St. Louis, at 74, his maladroit answer to an NPR reporter’s question about abortion led all the obituaries.
A longtime board member of Missouri Right to Life, and stalwart pro-life member of the Missouri Legislature and the U.S. House of Representatives, Akin explained to his interviewer that abortion should not be necessary for victims of rape because “if it’s legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down,” at which point all hell broke loose. Prominent Republicans, including Missouri’s Republican Sen. Roy Blunt, urged Akin (who had narrowly won a contentious primary) to withdraw from the race while the GOP presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, declared that Akin’s comments about “legitimate rape” were “deeply offensive, and I can’t defend what he said.”
There was a nationwide effort to drive him from the race by withholding contributions while a defiant Akin alternately apologized and sought to explain his remarks as a slip of the tongue. The damage was done, however: McCaskill’s winning campaign theme was supplied by her opponent, and, overnight, Akin was transformed into the butt of media discourse.
Two years later, in a memoir titled Firing Back: Taking on the Party Bosses and Media Elite to Protect Our Freedom, Akin had come to regret his apologies. “By asking the public for forgiveness,” he wrote, “I was validating the willful misinterpretation of what I had said. … My comment about a woman’s body shutting the pregnancy down was directed to the impact of stress on fertilization. … The research is not conclusive, but there is considerable evidence that stress makes conception more difficult. And what could be more stressful than rape?”
In one sense, Akin had a point: His invocation of “legitimate rape” was not intended to suggest that rape is ever “legitimate,” and there was little effort by an unsympathetic press to clarify what he meant. Still, evidence of “the female body [shutting] the whole thing down” because of stress is scant, while Akin’s verbal clumsiness obscured the case he was trying to make: “A child who is conceived in rape” should “have the same right to life as a child who’s conceived in love.”
William Todd Akin was born into a family long prominent in St. Louis business and civic affairs. His great-grandfather was the founder of Laclede Steel Company, manufacturer of carbon and alloy steel, where his father later served as chief executive before retiring and taking up a second career as a Presbyterian minister. Akin earned an engineering degree at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts and, following in his father’s footsteps, a master’s degree in divinity at the Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis.
Working for IBM and Laclede Steel in the 1970s and ’80s, Akin spent a decade as a reserve engineering officer in the National Guard. But his strong evangelical faith drew him not to the ministry but politics: Elected to the Missouri Legislature in 1988, he was a stalwart opponent of abortion and casino gambling and a consistent supporter of home-schooling and fiscal reform. His popularity among religious conservatives enabled him to prevail narrowly in a crowded Republican primary for Missouri’s 2nd Congressional District, which he won in 2000. And until his ill-fated Senate campaign in 2012, Akin’s success was a tribute to his mixture of religious conviction and political principle.
Claire McCaskill, who was defeated for reelection in 2018, offered Akin a left-handed compliment last week: “He actually believed in everything he said, which is a tribute to his character.”
Philip Terzian is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
