The Catholic Spirit: MCC urges participation to help families, defeat physician-assisted suicide and sports gambling

Urging people to support legislation that helps individuals and families and to contest bills that are detrimental to the common good and contrary to Church teaching, Adkins and Hangge addressed physician-assisted suicide, mandating health insurance coverage for in-vitro fertilization procedures, as well as the legalization of sports gambling. Questions and their responses have been edited for clarity and brevity.

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Q) Regarding abortion, we saw a significant change last year (lawmakers codified a right to abortion, expanded taxpayer funding to include elective abortions and eliminated a 24-hour waiting period before a woman could undergo an abortion, among other changes) Are there other areas that Catholics should be alert to and wanting to get involved with?

A) (Hangge) Working to help families is one piece of it. We’re also working collaboratively with other groups in the state to figure out a path forward. We’ve gotten a lot of requests from parishes to come out and speak, probably over a dozen that I’ve done … to give a rundown of what happened last session, what’s coming, how people can get involved.

Q) There is legislation proposed this session (HF1658/SF1704) that would mandate health insurance plans — including those provided by religious organizations — to cover in-vitro fertilization procedures. Can you share where this legislation falls when it comes to the Church’s teaching on the ethics of conception?

A) (Hangge) We know that it’s hard when parents are facing infertility, but we also don’t want to mass produce children. Eugenics can come into this (with) a lot of ethical implications. What do we do with the embryos that are left over? Another thing that this bill could do is potentially normalize surrogacy (bearing a child for another woman) in the state. Quoting Pope Francis, “I deem deplorable the practice of so-called surrogate motherhood, which represents a grave violation of the dignity of the woman and the child.”

Q) There is legislation known as the End-of-Life Options Act (HF1930/SF1813). Others call it the Assisted Suicide Act. Can you explain what this legislation seeks to do and how Catholics can approach the issue?

A) (Adkins) The bill would require that doctors and nurse practitioners, when dealing with patients with a terminal diagnosis, that they advise them of the opportunity to receive what’s called assisted suicide, or lethal drugs, that they can take themselves to end their lives. … We should be pursuing better healthcare options and giving people more healthcare choices, not pushing them into a corner where they feel like assisted suicide is their only choice. Our position is, let’s expand healthcare options and find better ways to care for one another.

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Q) There has been a proposal to legalize sports betting (HF2000/SF1949). It didn’t pass this last go around, but it is still alive and might be debated. Can you talk about the Joint Religious Legislative Coalition’s opposition to gambling expansion and what it hopes to accomplish this session regarding online sports betting?

A) (Adkins) We’re glad to partner with others in the faith community and have a united front in defense of human dignity through the Joint Religious Legislative Coalition. The Minnesota Catholic Conference, along with the Minnesota Council of Churches, the Jewish Community Relations Council, and the Islamic Center of Minnesota, built (the coalition).

We find common ground for the common good on poverty-related issues. And one of our longstanding positions has been against the expansion of gambling. Why? Of course, the Catholic Church is the bingo church, right? It’s not so much that games of chance are wrong. But the types of gambling prevalent today are heavily addictive. It’s meant to stimulate a passionate response, just like all addictive behaviors. And it puts people into a system that breaks apart families, harms people financially, and drives people deeper into debt and deeper into poverty.

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