Assisted suicide is a tragic response to PTSD. This case appears to be receiving a viral response, most of which appears to be expressions of shock and disapproval.
The original Twitter link prompting this post has since been deleted but here is a screencap.
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| I eliminated his identity to respect the writer who later deleted this message. There were many more replies, of course, but I'm keeping the ones I copied. I'm sure this case will have plenty of social media responses. |
I'm not saying I have the answers or I know it all because I couldn't imagine how I would feel in that position, but if we, at least officially, believe that rapists can rehabilitate then shouldn't the same principle be applied to their victims?
This is the text of the original report from Australia.
Noa Pothoven, 17, has been legally euthanized in the Netherlands, saying the pain she was dealing with after a childhood rape was “insufferable”. Noa, from Arnhem, said in a social media post a day before her death last Sunday that she “breaths but no longer lives”.Noa wrote an autobiography called Winning or Learning, after sexual assaults and rapes as a small girl led her to develop post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anorexia. She was attacked three times as a youngster. The first two incidents were molestations when she attended children’s parties aged 11 and 12 before she was raped by two men when she was 14 in the Elderveld neighbourhood of the city.
For years she never revealed the horrific abuse because it left her feeling ashamed, the 17-year-old said.
“I deliberated for quite a while whether or not I should share this, but decided to do it anyway,” she wrote. “Maybe this comes as a surprise to some, given my posts about hospitalisation, but my plan has been there for a long time and is not impulsive.
“I will get straight to the point: within a maximum of 10 days I will die. After years of battling and fighting, I am drained. I have quit eating and drinking for a while now, and after many discussions and evaluations, it was decided to let me go because my suffering is unbearable.”
“Out of fear and shame, I relive the fear, that pain every day. Always scared, always on my guard. And to this day my body still feels dirty.
“My house has been broken into, my body, that can never be undone. “
Noa spent her final hours saying goodbye to her heartbroken friends and family. She asked them to “not convince me that this is not good, this is my decision and it is final.”
“Love is letting go, in this case,” she added. She said her mother Lisette had “always been there for me” - however according to Dutch law, her mum did have a say in her daughter’s decision.
Last year, she revealed she had been admitted to hospital in a critical condition after her anorexia left her organs on the brink of failure. Doctors placed her into a medically-induced coma to feed her through tubes.
Dutch minister Lisa Westerveld, who first made contact with Noa in December after her newspaper interview, visited the 17-year-old before she was euthanised. She said: “It was nice to see her again. It is also very unreal. Noa was incredibly strong and very open. I will never forget her. We will continue her struggle. “
Children as young as 12 can opt for euthanasia in the Netherlands but only after a doctor determines that the patient’s pain is unbearable. Euthanasia is also legal in some US states, Canada and Belgium.
Here are some replies to this twitter link:
- Truly terrifying if you ask me. Sent shivers down my spine as I was reading about it
- Jesus Christ, this has really horrifying implications
- As a formerly depressed teenager who experienced some of the same types of trauma as this young woman, it’s unconscionable that this action was taken. She was 17....
- It’s more complex than the headline suggests. Her health as an indirect result of the trauma seems to have deteriorated significantly (due to anorexia). But it is none the less disturbing.
- I think many Dutch people had no idea either. I don't remember the euthanasia debate being about cases such as these. Or maybe most people (including me) didn't pay enough attention. A slippery slope exposed if I ever saw one.
- Yeah, I’m completely in favour of euthanasia for dementia/terminal diseases but this....no, it’s ghoulish and wrong.
- not sure how I feel about this. my gut reaction is to say it's wrong. however, some people never get better. forcing them to live or commit unsafe suicide themselves doesn't feel right either. but 17 years old is *extremely* young. her brain wasn't completely developed yet.
- I'm surprised the story doesn't go into more detail. like... how did the doctor come to the decision that her pain was unbearable and why did her mother agree to it? did they discuss all other options? the tone of everyone involved seems off and weirdly casual.
- The rational part of your brain isn’t fully developed until 25. There was a way for her to recover. I believe that absolutely.
- Me too. I'm not against euthanasia in principle either. I believe people should be allowed to die in dignity. But Christ not 17
- If she was 17 & had terminal cancer? That’s different. This is PTSD and clinical depression. Both can be hard to treat but they’re not untreatable by any stretch.
- I think assisted suicide should also be an option for people with mental illness, too, but only above a certain age and with strong regulations and requirements (eg only after all available treatments have been exhausted). there are people who never get better.
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The replies thread at this Ann Althouse post is long, varied and thoughtful.
A web search for "Noa Pothoven story" already gets over a hundred thousand responses. The DW link looks especially good.
Addendum, forty-eight hours later...
Deploying one of the news outlet’s trademark long, outrage-inducing headlines, the website claimed: “Dutch girl, 17, who was sexually abused at 11 and raped as a 14-year-old is legally euthanised at her home by ‘end-of-life’ clinic because she felt her life was unbearable due to depression.”
The story about Pothoven being “legally euthanised”, complete with Instagram tributes from the 17-year-old’s sister, soon spread across other English-speaking online news outlets.
In less than 24 hours, versions of the story were written by the Sun, the Daily Star, the Independent, UNILAD, Sky News, the Times, the Italian press, the Australian News Corp–owned News.com.au, the New York Post, the Daily Beast, NBC–part-owned Euronews, and the Washington Post.
They weren’t just referencing Mail Online’s story. Some didn’t attribute the information to anywhere.
Even the BBC’s World Service did a segment about Pothoven’s “euthanasia”, with a correspondent giving an important caveat midway through the interview: “I should make it clear, we’re not entirely certain about how [she] actually died.”
It didn’t matter, because the story about the Dutch teen who had been “legally euthanised” clocked hundreds of thousands of shares on Facebook and countless retweets on Twitter, becoming the biggest story in the world. According to the Mail Online’s display, the story had been shared a staggering 124,000 times.
By Wednesday, the story was front-page news in Italy and was so dominating the internet conversation that the pope appeared to weigh in with a subtweet.
“Euthanasia and assisted suicide are a defeat for all,” @Pontifex wrote on Twitter. “We are called never to abandon those who are suffering, never giving up but caring and loving to restore hope.”
But amid all the online outrage and all the pageviews, it appears all the media outlets that ran the story missed a key fact.
On Wednesday, thanks to the diligence of Politico Europe reporter Naomi O’Leary, the truth finally started to emerge outside of the Netherlands: Noa Pothoven had not been “legally euthanised” at all.
She had requested euthanasia under Dutch law but had been refused. She died at home after refusing to eat, and her parents and doctors agreed not to force-feed her, offering her palliative care instead.
After O’Leary used her Twitter feed to lay out the facts of the story and call out the outlets that had unquestioningly gone with the false version, those outlets quickly began changing headlines, rewriting copy, and deleting sentences.
Last year it was reported that Pothoven applied for euthanasia or assisted suicide at an end-of-life clinic in The Hague, but her request was rejected.
A spokesperson for the clinic told DutchNews that they could not confirm or deny that she was actually a patient: “There are very few young adults in euthanasia clinics, and it’s even rarer to see them for psychiatric reasons. Euthanasia of someone who is 60 is very different to that of someone who is 16. But we follow the law, which says someone must be in unbearable suffering with no other alternative.”
In a statement published to their website, the end-of-life clinic say they’ve been inundated with requests for comment following the death of Pothoven, and said that due to privacy rules, they can’t make any statement about this.
They wrote: “To put an end to incorrect reporting (in foreign media in particular) about her death, we refer to the statement made by friends of Noa this afternoon: Noa Pothoven did not die of euthanasia.
“To stop her suffering, she has stopped eating and drinking. De Levenseindekliniek deals exclusively with euthanasia and does so explicitly within the Dutch legal framework.”
The law in the Netherlands for euthanasia is careful with very strict guidelines, and the penalty for unlawful euthanasia can lead to 12 years’ imprisonment. The number of cases of death by euthanasia fell 9% last year. However, end-of-life clinics have been getting more requests from people under 30.
The Royal Dutch Medical Association (RDMA) have released a statement saying that the international media have misrepresented the death of Pothoven.
They wrote: “The RDMA feels the urge to correct the misreporting, because it gives a wrong impression of Dutch law and practice.
“Under Dutch law, euthanasia is defined as the active termination of life, by a physician, at a patient’s voluntary and well-informed request. Euthanasia can be performed under strict conditions on persons who suffer unbearably and hopeless from a medical condition.”
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As with many viral social media stories this one will likely approach a kind of web immortality, a clickbait meme, another gift that keeps on giving in the form of comments, links and other traffic generating revenue streams wherever it travels. I'm tired of chasing this rabbit as I end this post but the reader is welcome to follow the links and read to your heart's content.
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