By Rick Green
THE KEENE SENTINEL
A N.H. House committee killed a bill Tuesday that would have allowed a man to prevent a woman he’d impregnated from getting an abortion.
House Bill 1181 was sidelined earlier this year for study in the interim period between legislative sessions. The House Judiciary Committee had the choice of resubmitting it for consideration in next year’s legislative session or scrapping it. The panel chose the latter, 12-7.
Rep. Marjorie Smith, D-Durham, said the bill would intrude on private decisions a woman might discuss with her partner, her religious leader or her medical provider.
“But I don’t think there’s room for 424 legislators in the decision, so that is why I believe it’s not appropriate for further action,” Smith said.
Rep. Kurt Wuelper, R-Strafford, expressed an opposite view.
“This is about the government not being involved,” he said. “That’s the point, to allow the father, who is one of the two parents, to have some say in the life of the child. I say the father should have the same reproductive freedom, if you want to call it that, as the mother.”
The bill was sponsored by Rep. Jeffrey Greeson, R-Wentworth.
He said when the bill first came before the committee early this year that his goal was to protect the man’s rights.
“Although the Supreme Court has stated that protection of the woman’s rights is of greater weight, they have never said the father has had no rights,” Greeson said. “No uterus, no opinion is not the law.
“This bill maintains the state’s interests in the life of the preborn baby, protects all the rights of the pregnant woman but now recognizes the rights of the father.”
Greeson did not return calls for comment Tuesday.
Under his bill, a man would have been able to request an injunction to prohibit a woman pregnant by him from obtaining an abortion. If the woman denied his assertion of paternity, he would have been given a chance to prove it through DNA testing.
The court would have had various grounds for refusing the injunction, including in cases where the pregnancy was the result of incest or a rape that the woman had claimed before the injunction was sought.
Dr. Oge Young, a retired Concord OB-GYN and past president of the N.H. Medical Society, testified at the earlier hearing.
“I’ve been around a long time. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more ludicrous anti-abortion bill in all my time here,” he said.
Young pointed out that the bill would allow any man to block a woman’s abortion pending paternity testing, which could take days or weeks.
“That means that any of us males in this room could claim fatherhood in another woman’s pregnancy, and without penalty,” he said.
“Practically speaking, this bill would delay a woman’s termination [abortion] up to over a month, making it impossible to do the termination early in pregnancy when it is the safest.”
Rick Green can be reached at [email protected] or 603-355-8567.
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