Though Mr. Akin initially apologized for the comments, he later defended them in a book published in 2014 that detailed his experience as a six-term Republican congressman. By asking the public for forgiveness, Mr. Akin wrote in the book, he had validated the “willful misinterpretation” of what he had said.
Mr. Akin was born to Paul and Nancy Akin on July 5, 1947, in New York and grew up near St. Louis. He graduated from an elite prep school, John Burroughs, and received a degree in engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts before earning a master’s in divinity from the Covenant Theological Seminary in Missouri. He worked as a manager at Laclede Steel, which his great-grandfather founded.
A member of the Presbyterian Church in America, he was first elected to the Missouri House in 1988, gaining support from his first political base as part of a network of parents who home-schooled their children; Mr. Akin home-schooled all six of his.
In 2000, he was elected to Congress in what analysts at the time said was a stroke of political fortune. He was seen as an outside candidate in a five-way Republican primary, and he won by 56 votes as the more moderate candidates ate into one another’s totals.
As a legislator, he unapologetically centered his faith, driven by a belief that God had given him a mission to serve.
“He wouldn’t violate his beliefs if you shot him,” Rick Mathes, of the Mission Gate Prison Ministry where Mr. Akin served on the advisory board, said in 2012.
In his 2012 concession speech, Mr. Akin said after “the circumstances that we’ve all been through” it was “particularly appropriate to thank God, who makes no mistakes and is much wiser than we are.”