A 17-year-old rape victim was euthanized in the Netherlands after she said the pain that her sexual assaults had caused her was “insufferable.”
“I will get straight to the point: within a maximum of 10 days I will die,” Noa Pothoven, from Arnhem, the Netherlands, wrote Saturday before she was legally euthanized. “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 deliberated for quite a while whether or not I should share this, but decided to do it anyway,” Pothoven said on Instagram. “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.”
“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,” she said. “My house has been broken into, my body, that can never be undone.”
She said that she “breaths [sic] but no longer lives.”
Pothoven endured three different incidents of sexual assault that she outlined in an autobiography she wrote titled Winning or Learning. She claimed to have been molested at age 11 and 12, and raped at age 14 by two men.
It is legal in the Netherlands for children as young as 12 to get euthanized for unbearable pain.
Dutch minister Lisa Westerveld visited Pothoven before she was euthanized.
“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,” Westerveld said.
“This happens, because once you accept that some lives are not worthy of protection and should be ended, it is only a question of which lives and what conditions should qualify for assisted suicide, or euthanasia,” said Dr. Gordon MacDonald, the head of Care Not Killing. The group, based in the U.K., opposes euthanasia and assisted suicide.
“In Holland, where this latest tragic case has taken place, there has been a steady increase in the number of euthanasia deaths, which in 2017 accounted for more than 4% of all deaths. At the same time we have seen a dramatic escalation in the range of conditions, which meet the medical and legal threshold,” MacDonald added.
Pothoven told her Instagram following not to try convincing her against taking her own life, saying, “This is my decision and it is final.”
