Editor’s Note: This post has been revised throughout to account for new information about the case.
Euthanasia advocates claim it is “compassion.” But it is really abandonment most foul.
A Dutch teenager, who was raped by two men when she was 14, will never live to adulthood or overcome the severe depression the attack caused. Instead, per the Washington Post:
In what she termed a “sad last post” on Instagram, Noa Pothoven, 17, wrote Saturday that she would be dead within 10 days. But it had been “so long,” she added, since she had “really been alive.”
. . .
It was unclear whether her death had come with the involvement of doctors, whose assistance she had at one point requested. A spokeswoman for a member of the Dutch parliament who had recently visited her told DutchNews.nl that she understood the death to be a result of the girl’s refusal to eat.
The Guardian adds:
A hospital bed was set up in her parents’ home and last week she refused all food and fluids. Her parents and doctors reportedly agreed not to force-feed her. Dutch medical guidelines stipulate that if a patient withholds their consent, “care providers may not provide treatment, nursing or care”.
Does the exact cause of the girl’s death really matter? A teenager — with a terrible psychiatric condition — was allowed to make herself dead instead of receiving continued and robust treatment efforts. That’s abandonment as surely as providing a lethal injection.
This is where all assisted suicide/euthanasia legalization laws eventually lead. Once a society accepts killing is an acceptable way to eliminate human suffering, there is no limit as to the categories of suffering that will eventually justify eliminating the sufferer.
Those with eyes to see, let them see.