June 6, 2019

"It is legal for someone as young as 12 to request and receive euthanasia, as long as the parents give their permission, according to Dutch law."

"For those 16 to 18, parents must be aware of the request but their permission is not necessary....  [Steven] Pleiter, the director of the end-of-life clinic in The Hague, said that gaining approval for euthanasia was a complex process. After the clinic receives a request, he said, it is reviewed, with doctors and nurses making home visits and conducting multiple interviews. Every person seeking euthanasia must meet criteria set by Dutch law, which include ensuring that the request is voluntary, that the person is in unbearable suffering with a poor prognosis that shows no improvement, and that he or she is mentally able to understand the process and its consequences.... The clinic received 2,600 euthanasia requests in 2018 — 27 percent to 28 percent of them were from mentally ill patients, according to Mr. Pleiter. Of the 727 patients who were euthanized last year, about 50 were patients with mental health problems, he said."

From "Dutch Teenager’s Death Sets Off Debate, and Media Corrections" (NYT). The teenager, Noa Pothoven, was not, contrary to news reports, given this Dutch euthanasia. She asked for it but was denied for reasons that are not disclosed. She died, we're now told, by her own action of ceasing to eat or drink. It sounds as though she was with her family and under medical care when she died but no lethal injection was delivered by a doctor. Her mother is quoted as having said, before the death, "Noa doesn’t want this life anymore. She just longs for peace."

ADDED: A few important details from the BBC report:

1. The "friends and family want people to know that she did not die of euthanasia" and want their privacy respected. I presume they are not happy about the criticism they received after the way the story was originally told.

2. After Noa Pothoven stopped eating, she was force fed through a tube for a while, but "[e]ventually her family accepted her wish to die, so they stopped forcing her to stay alive and instead used palliative care to make her final days as peaceful and bearable as possible." There seems to have been "palliative sedation... to alleviate suffering" as she died. This is easy to confuse with euthanasia, but it's not the same as the euthanasia procedure described above.

3. The girl's own refusal to eat is considered the cause of death. The use "palliative drugs" to ease a path to death when force-feeding is still a way back to life could be characterized as euthanasia, but it's not that official process defined in Dutch law. The Royal Dutch Medical Association is anxious to communicate this distinction: "Under Dutch law, euthanasia is defined as the active termination of life, by a physician, at a patients voluntary and well informed request... on persons who suffer unbearably from a medical condition." Accepting that a person is committing suicide and not actively intervening to save her is not euthanasia as defined in Dutch law, even if drugs are given to ease the pain.

4. The parents blame the Dutch authorities for making her wait "more than a year" to get treatment for her eating disorder. When she finally got treatment, it was intense — including an induced coma with tube feeding. The BBC article does not go into the difference that might have been made if she had received treatment for anorexia much earlier or the psychological effect of forcing a tube into a person who was traumatized by rape.

37 comments:

Lucid-Ideas said...

Wow.

That's a lot words, a lot of complicated processes, and a lot of bureaucracy for something that's simply as murder.

I read around the net a lot of pro-choice people were taken aback even by this girl's parents. I don't know why. Isn't post-birth abortion exactly what they're gunning for? This is the equivalent of ancient pagans placing their infant on a high rock and letting it die of exposure because of some handicap. In this case, "she doesn't want this life anymore."

12 year old euthanasia. Why do these death-cultists even bother with an age limit? Why the fig leaf?

Horrifying and shameful.

reader said...

When I was twelve my mom did not allowme to see Halloween, Damian Omen II, or Jaws 2. I cannot imagine a situation in which she would permit me to commit suicide.

tim in vermont said...

Finally a solution to our incel problem!

I kid, I kid. I think incels are mostly indulging a fetish. Send the rest to some kind of boot camp.

n.n said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Dave Begley said...

Things can look pretty bleak when one's a teenager. And some parents might want to get rid of their teenagers. This is so, so wrong. One might even say truly, madly, deeply wrong.

Can we all now agree that European civilization is completely corrupt and exhausted? It was nice seeing the French and Brits honor the D Day vets and all that, but that's in the rear view mirror.

James K said...

From what I’ve read, the 17-year-old was unable to get mental health care due to a year-long wait list. A casualty of socialized medicine. Very sad.

Rob said...

Pretty girl, but she could stand to lose a few pounds.

Too soon?

n.n said...

There is an opening, albeit narrow. Safe, legal, and rare, though normalized.

Finally a solution to our incel problem!

Incels, volcels, transcels, and noncels, too.

James K said...

And in a sane world, parents allowing a child to starve herself to death would be murder—reckless disregard for life, child neglect.

Jalanl said...

Don't often comment but the last few days have reinforced my world view: All human life is sacred and a gift from God. So no life should be taken lightly. Grandma is just as precious as everyone else and so is a baby. The alternative is situational thinking Life is only worth while if the person(s) with power thinks it is. Situational value leads directly to the 100+ million people killed by socialists in the 20th century.

rcocean said...

Some kids get a permission slip to go on a field trip. Others get a permission slip to kill themselves.

"Dear Doctor. Please kill Johnnie, its OK with US. /s/ Mom and Dad"

Thank God, the Dutch are so....responsible.

Big Mike said...

@Althouse, didn’t you just blog about this? May I ask what’s new?

Michael K said...

More ick factor,.

h said...

My first exposure to the information that the news stories had important details wrong came from (ta-dah) a comment in the Althouse blog. That commenter deserves high praise, because she was one of the first (the first?) to do some fairly easy web searching on the subject and get the story right.

Anthony said...

I have a bit of a contrarian view, based on this article and my own views: You can't force someone to eat and drink. This girl had severe mental illness and had tried to kill herself multiple times. Hook her up to feeding tubes? She'd probably rip them out first chance she could get. Handcuff her so she couldn't? Yeah, that's humane.

I know AS is ripe for abuse. I don't have a solution ready to hand. But telling an adult in excruciating pain or profound disability that they just have to sit there and take it is, IMV, just plain cruel.

h said...

THe Althouse commenter was Lydia posting at 7:32 on the Tuesday night cafe.

Karen of Texas said...


"EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is a method used by psychotherapists to help people eliminate the lasting effects of traumatic events. This method can help people overcome traumatic events when other methods fail.

Francine Shapiro, PhD, who noticed that certain eye movements reduced the intensity of her disturbing thoughts and made her less anxious during a walk in nature, initially developed this method. She tested the method with trauma victims and published her findings in 1989, establishing it as an evidence-based level treatment for trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder."

It is highly recommended that you find a therapist who specializes in EMDR if you have encountered traumatic events in your past because it can help you process them and eventually regain your life. There are more than a few in this country.

Apparently socialized medicine means people simply accept their fate? How can I know of a possible method to help this child, while those administering Dutch Law have no clue? Why it's as if they don't want to spend the time, effort, or money...

I don't even have words for a society that would countenance allowing 12 year olds - or a traumatized 17 year old - to kill themselves 'with society's blessing'.

madAsHell said...

From what I’ve read, the 17-year-old was unable to get mental health care due to a year-long wait list.

Most of my mental health care began with a swift kick in the ass from my old man. Oddly, he didn't have a wait list.

All kidding aside, I think that's one sick family.

Robin Goodfellow said...

The assertion that she was not euthanized seems to be a bit misleading. No, she wasn't given a lethal injection; but "Noa Pothoven’s family told Dutch news outlets on Thursday that she had stopped taking food and had been under the supervision of a medical team."

It seems to be a distinction without a difference if a medical team allowed her to die.

Achilles said...

The state needs to force a feeding tube down this girl's throat.

We also need to have a new federal agency that goes around and makes sure doctors aren't committing euthanasia. This is precisely what we want our police to spend time doing.

We also need them to monitor social media. Anyone thinking of killing themselves will have to be involuntarily committed and re-educated.

These are all reasonable solutions. Anything else is murder. MURDER!

Nothing could possibly go wrong giving the state these powers.

Achilles said...

Robin Goodfellow said...
"The assertion that she was not euthanized seems to be a bit misleading. No, she wasn't given a lethal injection; but "Noa Pothoven’s family told Dutch news outlets on Thursday that she had stopped taking food and had been under the supervision of a medical team.""

It seems to be a distinction without a difference if a medical team allowed her to die.


MURDER!

The doctors should have had the police cart her off to an institution and fed her through a feeding tube while she was strapped to a bed and re-educated.

Totally legit use of state power.

Nothing could go wrong.

Achilles said...

Lucid-Ideas said...
Wow.

That's a lot words, a lot of complicated processes, and a lot of bureaucracy for something that's simply as murder.


MURDER!

We need to make sure that bureaucracy is saving these people from themselves, not murdering them.

With straight jackets and padded cells and feeding tubes.

If the state isn't forcibly saving you, it is committing MURDER.

n.n said...

It seems to be a distinction without a difference if a medical team allowed her to die.

Comparable to allowing a planned child that survived an attempted abortion, to die under cruel and unusual circumstances in an abortion chamber.

n.n said...

Apparently socialized medicine means people simply accept their fate?

GCD or greatest common divisor. It's a progressive plague in American schools, corporations, military, and social institutions, too. It's a feature of diversity or color judgment including racism, sexism, etc.

etbass said...

Big Mike, are you only just discovering that Althouse occasionally touches on the same subject more than once. How about countless posts on feminist related crap?

And by the way, this subject is not nearly as trivial as the countless posts.

Ann Althouse said...

Wow. I can’t believe readers don’t see what is new here. I had to blog this because of the way the story changed! You think this is a repetition?!

n.n said...

There is always a natural rite of self-abortion. However, this was not it. The State was involved in determining her fate, under circumstances that indicate she was not of sound mind.

Not an oldster. said...

That was an ugly story with an ugly comments thead that died a sad death. Maybe no one wants to relive that here, Ann. What more is to say? Media got the original story wrong and lots of outlets ran it, w/o checking? RIP fake news story.

RK said...

When your 14 year-old asks to be euthanized, it's a bit tempting to say "yes" ... am I right?

Tomcc said...

It's a truly awful outcome in either case. What I find difficult to resolve is the medical community evidently conceded that there was no way to help this child. How does one live with that outcome? They, and her parents, collaborated in her slow, painful suicide.

Big Mike said...

@Althouse, with respect, a it isn’t new to us, at least one commentator pointed out that the girl killed herself by starvation and dehydration after being turned down foe euthanasia in the earlier post’s thread.

James K said...

Nothing could possibly go wrong giving the state these powers.

The sarcasm might be warranted if this had been an adult. It was a child. There is a role for the state to protect children against abusive, neglectful, or murderous parents.

cyrus83 said...

Morally not a lot changes with the correction on method of death. This is still a girl who desired to end her life, and her family and doctors were complicit in helping her carry it out, albeit by inaction rather than actively applying the coup de grace.

It doesn't change the sickening Dutch attitude toward suicide. The mere fact of allowing for suicide for minors should be shocking, even if it wasn't done here, because the point is the girl's parents and doctors were fine with the idea and helped her do it by inaction. It should go against every human instinct as a parent to desire the death of one's own child, and no healthy society should be willing to give up on minors so easily.

MB said...

"Noa doesn’t want this life anymore. She just longs for peace."
This sounds very stereotypically new-agey, and not in a good way.
It also sounds like what drug dealers tell themselves when they accidentally (or "accidentally") slip an overdose to one of their customers. Given Netherlands' liberal attitude toward drugs, no wonder her parents would say that.

Achilles said...

James K said...
Nothing could possibly go wrong giving the state these powers.

The sarcasm might be warranted if this had been an adult. It was a child. There is a role for the state to protect children against abusive, neglectful, or murderous parents.

MURDERERS!

Get CPS in there! Take that girl away and strap her to a bed and stuff a feeding tube down her throat until she is 18... or 21... or... wait wut?

CPS is never wrong and we need to get them properly involved in saving kids from murderous parents now!

Nothing could possibly go wrong.

Do you people even think about the results of your laws? Obviously not because you didn't learn after giving the government the power to define marriage.

The girl is sick. She needs help and her parents suck. But if you idiots get CPS involved in this shit and they come after my kids because they post something stupid about being sad on some internet site I am blaming you.

Ann Althouse said...

The idea that I don't need to update something on the front page because someone has already provided some updating in the comments makes little sense. The idea that *I* am repeating myself because some already said something similar in the comments is more far-fetched.

Narr said...

I'm with Achilles, here.

Narr
Life sucks for some people