Dr. Paul Saba has a new book out called "Made to Live," and he's not afraid to live out his pro-life beliefs even in the medical field in Canada. He's even gone to court about it. And he's our next guest here on the John Henry Weston Show.
00:00:00.000Romans based their teachings on Seneca, the philosopher, who said it was noble to kill yourself if you were sick, if you were feeble-minded, if you were handicapped.
00:00:16.040So modern—the Christians opened up hospitals, clinics connected to churches, and they cared for people.
00:00:25.460Even during the plague in Carthage, it was Christians who sacrificed themselves to care for those who were sick.
00:00:39.200Canada as a country tries to keep preachers from going extinct.
00:00:43.840We have saved the seals, saved the whales, and so on.
00:00:46.540But one of the things that, at least in today's Canada, they're trying to make extinct is pro-life doctors.
00:00:54.480We've got one of those nearing extinction creatures with us today.
00:01:16.280I just wanted to tell you about something in case you didn't already know it.
00:01:19.460LifeSite is in partnership with a group called St. Joseph's Partners, because in today's day and age where things are getting more and more strange out there, we want to be sure that, you know, we have some reserves of gold and silver so that if debanking happens, which has happened before and seems to have gone on with the truckers and everything else, that we at least have some backup.
00:01:41.840And so there's been a lot of investing in gold and silver.
00:01:45.540We wanted to find a company, though, that we could trust with our investments like that.
00:01:50.300And St. Joseph's Partners is such a company.
00:01:53.060Obviously, by their name, you know that they're Catholics, and we know that they're very, very faithful indeed.
00:01:57.400You can go check out the shows I did with Drew Mason, who is the founder of St. Joseph's Partners.
00:02:02.860But also, I wanted to tell you about a neat little project we did.
00:02:06.540And this is really for both support of LifeSite News, but also for gifts for those people who sort of have everything and you wonder what you can get for them.
00:02:15.620Well, we minted a coin, a silver coin, and it's a one ounce silver round, they call it.
00:02:23.440It has LifeSite on the front for our 25-year anniversary that we're celebrating, but also on the back, it commemorates the overturning of Roe v. Wade with the Dobbs decision.
00:02:34.740So it's a collector item coin, and I encourage you to grab one for yourself.
00:02:40.340Grab one as a gift for that person who seems to have everything else.
00:03:10.880So, Dr. Saba, it's very interesting to talk to a medical doctor about this, because your book, Made to Live, is very upfront about your support for life along the whole spectrum, both from conception to natural death.
00:03:26.520And, of course, in Canada, we have this medical aid in dying, which is euthanasia.
00:03:31.800And it's come in only over the last five years or so, but it's come in with such force.
00:03:39.060One of the first things it did was to slam into medical students such that they weren't able to get their medical degrees if they wouldn't agree to at least refer for euthanasia, which a lot of them had problems with in the first place.
00:03:56.200If you can address that first, because it's such a burning question, and then we'll get you to talk more generally about your book.
00:04:01.800It's part of the attempts to get away from medical ethics that were based and have been paid based on Christian principles.
00:04:13.160Sir William Osler, who is the founder of Modern Ethics, of which we as physicians have been practicing for decades, based all of his teaching on the Good Samaritan model.
00:04:26.580And Sir William Osler graduated from McGill University Medical School.
00:04:33.960He was also a leader at McGill, a professor of medicine, and he founded John Hopkins University.
00:04:40.680And he's considered the father of modern medical ethics, and he based all of his teachings on Christian principles.
00:04:48.240So going towards medical aid and dying, euthanasia, goes against those principles.
00:04:53.140You know, modern medicine has been based on taking care of those who are sick, those who are handicapped, those who have mental health problems.
00:05:05.300And this was not a model that was a basic medicine going back to the Roman times.
00:05:13.160In fact, Romans based their teachings on Seneca, the philosopher, who said it was noble to kill yourself if you were sick, if you were feeble-minded, if you were handicapped.
00:05:28.160So modern, the Christians opened up hospitals, clinics connected to churches, and they cared for people, even during the plague in Carthage.
00:05:41.160It was Christians who sacrificed themselves to care for those who were sick.
00:05:46.440So this is totally against medical ethics.
00:05:54.340This is retrograde medicine, going back to the Roman times.
00:06:00.480Hippocrates, obviously, who wasn't a Christian 2,500 years ago, he had enough clarity of mind to have physicians make an oath not to kill people and not to abort their female patients.
00:06:14.780So what is happening right now is barbaric.
00:06:18.760If we can back up now, I'd love to hear a little bit of your story.
00:06:22.300Because it's very rare to have a doctor in Canada who is openly pro-life and openly against euthanasia as well, openly against abortion and euthanasia.
00:07:02.500When in my book, I described how I came back to my Christian faith.
00:07:09.220But what really was pivotal and why I wrote the book, Made to Live, was really the experience my wife and I and our family had with our third-born, Jessica.
00:07:20.800Because at 20 and 24 weeks on the ultrasound, they said we had a serious problem.
00:07:26.220And they said, when they told us, they said that this future child, this pre-born child, would not have quality of life, had a serious heart condition, was probably down.
00:07:36.580And that we should consider our options and our options being abortion.
00:10:46.360We as people have lost our souls by accepting it.
00:10:52.140And that's why I believe very strongly we need a transition, not just in our laws, but in the hearts and minds of people who have been misled down this pathway of death.
00:11:04.980With regard to the life issues, I think there's certain basic questions that everybody has.
00:11:10.960And with euthanasia, it's a very, very difficult question because it's the suffering.
00:11:16.160You know, just as with abortion, it's always, well, what about rape and incest?
00:11:21.360On the euthanasia question, it's always, well, what about this grave suffering and people can't escape suffering?
00:11:28.080I mean, goodness, we take care of our dog when our dog is too sick.
00:11:31.500As much as it hurts us, we put our dog down to put it out of its misery.
00:12:19.800The physical suffering, and I always raise the question, did they get all the pain control that they needed and supports?
00:12:28.820And it's not always the case, but that's the case.
00:12:32.020It's usually it's they've just had enough.
00:12:34.640But we can, with quality palliative care, ease them out in a way so that they aren't physically suffering.
00:12:44.460What's the difference between giving somebody one shot and getting them out and letting them persist in a state that's going down?
00:12:55.480Well, I think the difference being in the state that they're in a decline, you never know when that can change.
00:13:04.280You can usually predict that it's especially near the last few days.
00:13:09.040But if you ease them, and just people have told me who have been with their loved ones, most people, not everybody,
00:13:15.100that it was valuable for them so that they could reconnect, that they could, you know, really spend those last few days with their parent or their brother, sister,
00:13:29.220reconnect, family members could come and spend time together.
00:13:32.220The World Medical Association, which represents over 11,000 doctors in 100, sorry, 11 million doctors in over 110 countries,
00:13:43.060is firmly opposed to assisted suicide and euthanasia.
00:13:47.200Not because, you know, we're doctors and we want people to suffer.
00:13:51.940We're trained to make, alleviate suffering, to cure when we can't to alleviate people's suffering and giving them the full support.
00:13:59.680And palliative care is not, does not include euthanasia and assisted suicide.
00:14:06.240The danger is, of course, not just in lives, valuable lives that could be lost.
00:14:11.540For example, in my book, I talk about cystic fibrosis and several children who were euthanized in Belgium.
00:14:19.340And only a few months later, a new treatment came out, which radically changed the treatment.
00:14:25.600It's actually a cure for cystic fibrosis.
00:14:28.260I wonder if those parents, if they had known about this new treatment only a few months later,
00:14:33.260would have had a different approach to having their children euthanized.
00:14:37.120And there are many new treatments that do come out.
00:14:39.160Some people say, well, you sort of, you know, you've got some really bad neurological disorders,
00:14:43.640and now that's being presented as a reason for doing it here in Quebec.
00:14:47.620And that's just been tabled, this new legislation.
00:14:51.820We should be investing, doing more research.
00:14:53.620I talk about that in my book, and promoting life.
00:14:57.880I talk about my father-in-law, who spent three weeks in the ICU, and he was basically given what they call palliative sedation, controlling his pain.
00:16:10.860And because life is so valuable, we need to give life a chance.
00:16:15.900I mean, there's a strong opposition to capital punishment, because you never know the innocent people who've been killed by capital punishment.
00:16:28.520And if you look at studies, they say about 4% of people who are in death row are actually innocent.
00:16:33.480But with assisted suicide, we're about 50% wrong in making diagnosis for serious illnesses.
00:18:12.300And they're extending it now with what they call anticipated.
00:18:18.160If, for example, as one doctor said, if the person can't recognize who their loved ones are, that could be a criteria for them to quickly be put to death.
00:18:29.260And there's no going back once they've signed the papers before they get to that point.
00:18:32.980But not recognizing somebody does not necessarily mean a person doesn't have quality of life.
00:18:38.420Lots of older people with memory deficits still enjoy life.
00:18:43.020They still enjoy having family members around, even if they don't necessarily remember their names.
00:23:25.980But you see, when people are really under lots of pressure, often they will choose to do abortions.
00:23:33.640If you look at the Guttmacher Institute, which is a very pro-abortion group,
00:23:39.300and they work with Planned Parenthood, in their studies, they showed in 2005,
00:23:43.14073% of women who decide on abortions do it for financial reasons.
00:23:47.200That means these are women feeling strapped.
00:23:48.820And then another large group within that were for lack of professional educational opportunities.
00:23:57.920When you talk about rape and incest, that's like less than 1%, even a very much smaller percent.
00:24:03.060So the large percentage, and this is what I'm really concerned, is that it's become an economic option.
00:24:11.880Society doesn't want to spend money to help support women who are poor.
00:24:17.500You know, and you have all these companies, large companies, I won't name their names,
00:24:23.220but that during the time of the Roe v. Wade being reversed, that they said, we'll support, we'll pay for abortion, we'll pay for transport.
00:24:33.640Rather than paying for just that, and if they want to, that's their choice.
00:24:37.420Also give women decent salaries, you know, don't exploit them.
00:24:43.840Because it's exploitation, the salaries that many of these big companies who are,
00:24:47.700and many of the owners and CEOs are billionaires, so that they have enough money so they can support
00:24:53.500and have children and bring them into the world.
00:24:55.720That, to me, is a question of social justice and equity that's being completely ignored.
00:25:01.780The euthanasia question does often come down to economics.
00:25:05.920We have a culture which is unable to afford a lot of our health care system because our population has dwindled.
00:25:17.400We don't have that much birth anymore in Canada in terms of the birth rate.
00:25:22.180So a lot of people have said, hey, we need to do something to adjust here because people's, you know,
00:25:27.760health care costs are greatest at the end of life, and we've got a glut there.