The story is not always the story.
National and international news outlets are focusing this morning on the way a Dutch teenager’s death was erroneously reported this week. Noa Pothoven’s death was described as the result of legal euthanasia in the Netherlands. Her family then had to clarify that her death was actually caused by starvation.
However, the emphasis should be less on the reporting of her death than on the fact that she chose to die.
Noa Pothoven was sexually assaulted at the age of eleven, then raped by two men three years later. She developed post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and eating disorders.
As her health continued to deteriorate, she posted on Instagram: “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.”
She was being fed through a tube before, as the BBC reports, “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.”
A “coffin-size” euthanasia pod
“Sarco” is a suicide chamber described by Fast Company as “a coffin-size pod you get into in order to painlessly and peacefully kill yourself on purpose.” The chamber rapidly replaces the oxygen in the pod with nitrogen gas, causing what the article describes as a “quick, painless” death.
Physician-assisted suicide is legally available to one in five Americans this morning. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suicide was the tenth leading cause of death in America in 2017, claiming more than forty-seven thousand lives. It was the second leading cause of death among individuals between the ages of ten and thirty-four.
There were more than twice as many suicides in the US as there were homicides.
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