Society's Child

Dutch teen raped as a child chose to be legally euthanized due to 'unbearable' pain - Update: Teen was not actually euthanized

Natalie O'Neill
New York Post
Tue, 04 Jun 2019 14:05 UTC

Comment: As it turns out, Western media had this story wrong. Ms. Pothoven did not in fact get euthanized by a doctor. Earlier today, Politico Europe's Naomi O'Leary tweeted a thread debunking the reports.

She clarified what actually happened:

"Noa Pothoven had been severely ill with anorexia and other conditions for some time. Without telling her parents, she sought and was refused euthanasia... The family had tried many kinds of psychiatric treatment and Noa Pothoven was repeatedly hospitalised... a hospital bed was set up at home in the care of her parents. At the start of June she began refusing all fluids and food, and her parents and doctors agreed not to force feed her. A decision to move to palliative care and not to force feed at the request of the patient is not euthanasia."

A 17-year-old Dutch girl was legally allowed to kill herself using euthanasia after she was raped when younger and spent years battling depression, according to a report Tuesday.

"Love is letting go, in this case," Noa Pothoven of Arnhem wrote in an Instagram post announcing her choice to die in the living room of her home Sunday.

Pothoven - who was sexually abused at 11 and raped three years later - said she was sick of suffering "unbearable" pain.

"Maybe this comes as a surprise to some, given my posts about hospitalization, but my plan has been there for a long time and is not impulsive," she wrote.

"I will get straight to the point: within a maximum of 10 days I will die," she added. "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.

"I breathe, but I no longer live."

In The Netherlands, kids ages 12 to 16 need permission from a parent to be euthanized and must have consulted a doctor, who agrees that their suffering is unbearable and likely to continue.

But at 17, children no longer need their parents' consent to apply to kill themselves. Pothoven turned 17 in December.

The Netherlands legalized euthanasia in 2001 - the year she was born.

There are no reports of her parents legally challenging her choice at age 17, although a year earlier, they refused to give her permission because they thought she should complete trauma treatment and that her brain should be fully grown before a definitive decision.

Pothoven, who asked friends not to try to change her mind, wrote before she died that she suffered from post-traumatic stress and anorexia in the wake of the sex attacks, according to the UK Sun.

Last year, she was admitted to the Rijnstate hospital in Arnhem seriously underweight and with near organ failure. She was put in a coma and fed via tubes.

In her 2018 autobiography "Winning or Learning," Pothoven said she was sexually assaulted at a friend's party at age 11, then again a year later at another get-together, before being raped by two men on the street at age 14. She has said she wrote her book to help other young people.

She said she didn't tell anyone about the sex attacks on her when they happened out of shame and fear.

"I relive the fear, that pain every day. Always scared, always on my guard. And to this day my body still feels dirty," Pothoven wrote in her book.

Pothoven said she tried hospitalization and visits with specialists to no avail before eventually contacting the Life End Clinic in The Hague about a year and a half ago, around age 16 - without her family's knowledge, the outlet reported.

Her parents had no idea she was tortured mentally until her mom found a plastic envelope in her room around the same time filled with farewell letters to them and friends, according to the Dutch newspaper De Gelderlander.

"I was in shock," her mom, Lisette, told the paper. 'We didn't get it. Noa is sweet, beautiful, smart, social and always cheerful. How is it possible that she wants to die?

"We have never received a real answer. We just heard that her life was no longer meaningful. For only a year and a half have we known what secret she has carried with her over the years," she said. "We, her parents, want[ed] her to choose the path of life."

Her dad, Frans, said the teen underwent electroshock therapy. He hoped she'd "see bright spots [in life] again, 'perhaps fall in love' or learn to discover that 'life is worth living."

More than 6,500 people ended their lives using euthanasia in the Netherlands in 2017, according to past reports. Belgium also allows people to get doctor assisted suicide for psychological reasons.

Comment: Belgian Senate votes to extend euthanasia to terminally ill children who are in great pain and want to die

Euthanasia must be performed under the standards of the Termination of Life on Request and Assisted Suicide Act.

Comment: See also:

Reader Comments

klokman · 2019-06-05T16:14:38Z

Well of course life is going to have little meaning, if you obsess over the trauma and fear brought by assault every day of your life. Magnifying its memory rather than observing and appreciating the beauties of this planet, and striving to improve the lot of others who suffer, in time will make a person want to die. A tragedy and terrible event cannot be unmade, but there are limitless possibilities and opportunities to crowd them out by creating new ones of laughter, empathy, and the self-satisfaction of a job well done.

Farewell, Noa. Don't expect life's outlook to improve after crossing over. The end of the body will not terminate the suffering. Like so many others, been there, done that.

looking4 · 2019-06-05T17:37:41Z

That story and fate is so, so sad that I almost feel anger. Was everybody involved doing their best? I don't get the electric shock therapy Could it be any good? That girl needed some sort of a shock but not this. She needed to be pulled to the light by different means. I understand that her experience cannot be empathized enough but on a spiritual level of existence I think she had not been told and explained enough. Don't want to judge at all but this young soul needed to have been told everything, good and bad, and be woken up by her own realization of death as a wrong choice. It seems to me that the world around her was (and is) just as empty and without meaning to exist as she was by the end.... but who knows. We won't know for sure.

Rowan Cocoan · 2019-06-05T18:01:29Z

This is sadly merely another example of the way modern society has let children down.

At age 43, I suffered a life changing injury as a direct result of me not legally killing two (unknown to me) uniformed yet young and stupid Nazis who were puppets planted by a malevolent higher ranking L.E.O.

My life since then has surely gone south. Most folks would have been paralyzed, but I was in phenomenal shape, and was not (paralyzed), despite the frame-up-orchestrating/ranking pig’s best efforts. Since then, not a second has gone by where I do not feel horrific pain in my legs.

But if I had been 17 - hell, 22! - when I suffered this malevolently inspired and caused physical and psychic injury, I would have had a far more horrific time dealing with it and yet would like to think that I would never have stooped so low as to suicide,*1 but, then again, I had no societal official ‘encouragement’ from then to do so.

But I know more now (I hope) for with age and experience comes wisdom.

Nowadays, though, children are taught to be weak!!! This poor girl is a victim of her likely already programmed and dumbed down parents and society almost as much as she is a victims of her rapists.*2

It is only through our stupid, “lowest common denominator as the highest allowable societal aspiration”*3 controlled ‘Modern society’, that she attached so much psychic harm to what occurred.

I have (in the last two decades) been known to truthfully say, that I would have rather been butt-f*cked by that Nazi on video, on the front steps of City Hall and same spread across every internet video in the world than have suffered the physical injury (which such injuries always involve some level of psychic wound) that I did. (This dates long further back than my first post on SOTT.)

People so much underestimate the effect of how much their already subjective assessments of x, y, or z, are influenced by their surroundings, society, AND belief systems, together with the manipulative and malevolent control group called the PTB/MSM.

This poor girl apparently did not have the sustaining value of ‘family’, and ‘clan’*4, to help her through this time. They likely acquiesced to the idea that ‘their society’/’the state’ knew best, as the parents were probably - like ours here - dumbed down and away from the higher objectives of individualism and the value of life.*5

Sad!

R.C.

*1 I don’t know if this is a comment on my clan, or on humanity, but I once told my favorite uncle, (who, like his big brother, my father, always appeared to me to be impossibly kind, wise, and, when I much later learned what the term meant, “Christ-like” ; again, I once noted to him that in my life up to that point,( I was about 32?) I had, at numerous times been “so depressed that I could understand why folks would kill themselves.”

He laughed and replied: “If you’ve not been that depressed, you’ve never lived.” I still do not fully understand his meaning, but, as time has passed, his point has gone from obtuse to being closer to ‘on point.’

*2 Who, the article Politically-Correctly omits, were almost surely ‘migrants’, a/k/a, folks imported to A)dumb down Western Society, and B) to eliminate its individual freedoms, for to most of those imported folks, a day where they do not have to pay police a bribe to go to the grocery store, is heavenly freedom.

Thus, by their presence, our “Western” individual rights are (as planned) being destroyed by stereotypical monopolistic/illegal-trust-type activities like ‘watering down,’ monopolization, exclusive dealing, price discrimination/price-fixing, control of essential facilities, product tying (e.g., MS trying to force IE on all, with no place for other browsers); predatory pricing; or, screwing around with/manipulating intellectual property, et al.

*3 I like that phrase.

*4 Each supposedly being horrifically evil, from a P.C. viewpoint,

*5 Note that Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty Four, foresaw that the ‘religions’ of the future -in all three world countries, (Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia), were each and all variants of ‘death worship.’ So please do not tell me that Orwell’s wisdom did not see these type end results.

RC

klokman · 2019-06-05T19:15:28Z

Rowan Cocoan I think you pretty well understand what your uncle was getting at. At 69 I've had my share of terror, grief, horror, and observed with absolute helplessness the life force of someone very close slip away (been on the edge of death myself so many times I've lost count). Looking into the jaws of Hell and Torment can transform a person's attitude to cherish living every day you have it. The pains of everyday living you just strive to take in stride, while looking for tomorrow to turn out a better day.

Here's what I think is at the root of Noa's attitude:

“Frank Pedersen, psychologist at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, has found that the more actively involved a six-month-old baby has been with his or her father, the higher that baby's scores on certain tests of mental and motor developments Similarly, Ross Parke, examining children over the first eight weeks of life, has found that the more fathers were involved in the everyday repetitive (even boring) aspects of care , such as bathing, feeding, dressing, and diapering, the more socially responsive the babies were. In addition, Parke also found such babies were able to withstand stressful situations better.

In the traditional family, father has always been acknowledged to play two vital roles in the lives of his children. First, he helps his offspring develop a sense of their own competence and independence outside the powerful intimacy of the mother/child couple . Second, he contributes powerfully to the sexual identity formation of his children." The Nurturing Father

For whatever reasons, Noa's father did not bond with his daughter and oversee directly her development from the time she was born. Pampered, indulged by authority figures, she didn't know how to deal with adversity.

Sadly, there is at least one generation alive now who are unfamiliar the previous generations who've gone through terrible trials. They've never seen anyone do it, much less role-model it.

Watchit · 2019-06-05T18:18:48Z

Actually, this was not a case of legal euthanasia but a suicide, i.e. death by willful starvation.

Full story here: [Link] [Link]

sleepercell · 2019-06-05T21:32:25Z

A gun would have been a lot quicker and a lot less suffering. To bad she couldn't overcome she had everything to live for at her age.

Snake1989 · 2019-06-06T03:29:51Z

They failed her...what doesn't kill you makes you stronger in this case.

I wouldn't be surprised if Katherine turns out to be trans.

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Society's Child

Dutch teen raped as a child chose to be legally euthanized due to 'unbearable' pain - Update: Teen was not actually euthanized

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