Legislators push bills halting rapists’ rights
Legislators and their supporters yesterday pushed bills filed in response to an explosive appellate court decision that allowed a rapist who impregnated his victim to press for visitation rights in family court over the mother’s protests.
“Rape that results in a child is the only violent crime that legally binds survivors to their attackers,” said Bambi Snodgrass of Topsfield, the mother of a rape survivor and a proponent of House Bill 773. “This must stop.” Rep. Michelle DuBois, (D-Brockton,) and Rep. Carmine Gentile, (DSudbury,) urged the Joint Committee on the Judiciary to support the bill, which would terminate the parental rights of adjudicated rapists unless the victim petitions the court and a judge finds the rapist a fit parent.
It also would create a civil procedure for termination of parental rights based on “clear and convincing” evidence; in other words, a woman who becomes pregnant through rape has the same legal standard to terminate the parental rights of the rapist as everyone else who wants to terminate a parent’s rights.
In both cases, the bill would not require the rapist’s consent if his victim chooses to put the child up for adoption.
But Wendy Murphy, director of the Women’s and Children’s Advocacy Project at the New England School of Law’s Center for Law and Social Responsibility, said the more pressing matter is undoing the 2014 amendment to Massachusetts law that created family court jurisdiction and parental rights for convicted rapists in the first place — an amendment that she called “unconscionable and a national embarassment” that is also “likely unconstitutional” because the state’s highest court already has ruled that biology alone, even for non-rapists, is insufficient to create such jurisdiction and rights.
Senate Bill 780, which Murphy co-authored with the committee’s Senate chairman, William Brownsberger, (D-Belmont), provides a constitutionally proper option by forbidding the establishment of family court jurisdiction and parental rights in cases where there has been a conviction, she said.
“Simply put, rape and family do not go together,” Murphy said.