If a child was conceived through rape, should the rapist have any parental rights?

That's one of the more provocative issues to emerge from a national conversation about rape and abortion that was ignited by Missouri Congressman Todd Akin's comments last month about “legitimate” rape.

But months before that controversy arose, lawmakers here were wrestling with that question — and they're likely to do so again.

In February, the House passed a measure to have the court automatically terminate a man's parental rights if he is convicted of felonious sexual assault of his child's mother.

The Senate Judiciary Committee, and later the full Senate, killed the bill, in part due to concerns over how the law would apply in statutory rape cases, according to committee members.

Victim advocates and even the measure's prime sponsor say it's a far more complicated issue than it may seem at first.

Still, Rep. Frederick Leonard, R-Rochester, says he'll bring back an improved version of his bill in the next session — provided he's reelected in November.

Under current state law, Leonard contends, “there's nothing preventing a rapist from dragging the mother into court and trying to get some sort of custody rights.”

His pro-life beliefs prompted him to sponsor House Bill 1273, he said, after a friend sent him an online video made by an attorney who chose to have her child after she was raped and who is now working to pass similar legislation nationwide.

His purpose, he said, is to eliminate the chance that a woman could choose abortion out of fear that her rapist might claim parental rights to maintain contact and control.

“That's really my motivation,” he said. “I firmly believe that life begins at conception, and regardless of how that life is conceived, that life deserves a chance.”

Relieving women of that anxiety, he said, “might help save some babies.”

Amanda Grady Sexton, director of public policy for the New Hampshire Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence, said her group kept track of HB 1273, “but we did not take a position on it.”

She described her coalition, the umbrella agency for 14 crisis centers, as “the voice of domestic violence and sexual assault survivors.” She said she's never heard of a case in New Hampshire in which a rapist was able to obtain parental rights, and no victims testified at hearings on the bill.

Grady Sexton also contends existing law covers the issue: RSA 170-C:5 allows judges to terminate parental rights under certain conditions. And one condition is conviction of a felony assault that results in injury to, among others, “the child's other parent.”

However, Sen. Fenton Groen, R-Rochester, the sole Senate sponsor of HB 1273, said there's “a lack of clarity” in current state law. And he said there have been cases in other states in which rapists sought parental rights to “intimidate their past victims.”

He said the reason the measure died in committee “was not disagreement with the concept, but the need for quite a bit more work on the bill.”

Groen said members had concerns about “unintended consequences,” such as in the case of a consensual relationship between a teenage girl and an older man that leads to marriage and a child. Later, in a bitter divorce, the woman could try to have her husband's parental rights terminated if he previously had been convicted of statutory rape.

Groen, who is not running for reelection, said the committee simply ran out of time to fix the bill that late in the session. He said he had argued for interim study, but the committee voted to kill the measure instead.

State Sen. Matthew Houde, D-Plainfield, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said no evidence was presented that there had ever been any difficulty in terminating parental rights in rape cases here. “My sense was it was a matter of course,” he said.

Grady Sexton said one possible complication to enacting a blanket law is the fact that a man would no longer be required to pay child support if his rights were terminated. And there could be some women who would want such financial support, she said.

She contends there can't be a “cookie-cutter approach” in such cases. “It needs to be what's best for the victim and their child.''

Leonard said he recently obtained model legislation that would let a rape victim file a petition in family court to terminate her rapist's parental rights if she could show “by clear and convincing evidence” that it was in the child's best interest. That would allow judges to consider cases in which prosecutors plea-bargained rape charges down to lesser offenses, he said.

It also would let judges weigh the facts in statutory rape cases, he said. “You don't need the same burden of proof to get a judge to be able to make a decision with regards to what's in the best interest of the child,” he said.

Grady Sexton said New Hampshire has some of the strongest laws in the nation dealing with domestic violence and sexual assault. Still, she said, her coalition would be happy to work with sponsors who want to strengthen what already exists.

“We're not convinced that there is a drastic need to change it, but if there are cases that we're not aware of, we would certainly be very anxious to work with legislators to fix any inadequacies in the laws,” she said.