Their expectations are not the result of mere prejudice. In August 2017, a Dutch doctor published a letter about the evolution of euthanasia in the country. “In 2015,” he wrote, “92 percent of the patients who received physician assisted dying had a serious somatic disease,” from which it follows that 8 percent (or 450 persons in absolute numbers) did not. Even this number may be an underestimate, for it was based on a survey to which only 78 percent of doctors replied. Furthermore, “serious somatic disease” is not the same as “imminently fatal disease.”
Dutch law does not require that the illness from which a candidate for euthanasia is suffering be terminal or indeed physical. In 1994, a psychiatrist, Boudewijn Chabot, was tried because he had administered fatal poison to a woman who had no physical illness and, according to him, no psychiatric disorder, either, but who simply wanted to die to rejoin her two sons, who had died before her. The lower courts exonerated him; the supreme court found him guilty but did not punish him, and allowed him to continue in practice. The only reason that he was found guilty of anything was that he had failed to consult a second doctor over his decision—a second opinion not being much of a safeguard, considering how doctors tend to defer to one another’s clinical wisdom. Interestingly, Chabot has himself since become alarmed at the looseness with which the legal criteria are now being applied, the routinization of the decision-making, the rubber-stamping for death.
In other words, the initial story about Pothoven was credible, though it turned out to be false. But even allowing a 17-year-old girl to dehydrate herself to death, in front of others, makes one feel uncomfortable, to say the least. She was refused euthanasia earlier because those who would have been responsible for killing her felt that she was too young: her brain, and her character, were not fully formed. Were her brain and character nevertheless formed enough for her to kill herself in front of others? In France, those who watched her die would have been guilty of a criminal offense.
By all accounts, her end was peaceful. Here she performed a valuable service: she successfully demonstrated that euthanasia is not necessary. All that is necessary for a person wishing to die to achieve his aim is to stop drinking for a relatively short time, and for his wishes to be respected. Proper care will ensure that he or she is comfortable.
Pothoven’s unbearable personal suffering was caused, she said, by the sexual abuse that she had suffered when she was 11, and rape by two men when she was 14. Certainly, she suffered severely from anorexia nervosa, on one occasion requiring hospitalization to save her from organ failure. But until very late in the day, said her mother, “We didn’t get it. Noa is sweet, beautiful, smart, social and always cheerful. How is it possible that she wants to die?”
It is possible that Noa had all along been disguising her inner turmoil, but it is also possible that her emotional state fluctuated wildly, as is often the way in adolescence. I would find it difficult to accept that a 17-year-old’s suffering was both unbearable and completely without hope of amelioration.
There was something distinctly histrionic or self-advertising about her suicide. She did not go quietly: she advertised or broadcast what she was going to do, and why she was going to do it. She did not want to shuffle off this mortal coil: she wanted to make a mark, to enter history. And she succeeded. It is to be hoped that there will be no Pothoven effect, comparable to the Werther effect in the late eighteenth century. Goethe’s novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, in which young Werther killed himself for frustrated love, was so successful all over Europe that susceptibly romantic young men killed themselves to emulate the protagonist.
You hardly need to be a psychiatrist to know that character is not fully formed at 17, that ideas and feelings often fluctuate wildly, that an adolescent’s grasp of reality may be tenuous and defective. In my experience of suicidal 17-year-olds, their conception of death is often ambiguous. They imagine a shadow existence in which they will be able to hover over their funerals and observe, not without a certain glee, the grief of those toward whom their feelings are also often ambivalent.
It is now generally accepted that patients with mental capacity have a right to refuse treatment offered them, even if their refusal will result in their deaths. The age at which a person becomes competent to make such decisions will always be to an extent arbitrary, but I should not fix it as low as 17, especially in someone as unstable as Pothoven. One test of a person’s competence to make the decision is whether that person has a grasp of the reality of his or her situation. Was Pothoven right, or realistic, to suppose that the 70 future years of her natural span (without killing herself, she could expect to live to 87) could and would be nothing but pain and misery?
Theodore Dalrymple is a retired British psychiatrist and a contributing editor of City Journal. This article was originally published HERE.
1 comment:
To ask, whether or not her expectation of seventy further years' misery was right or realistic, is a question that cannot be answered; for we are here entering the sphere of metaphysics. Philosophers often talk of "possible worlds" in which things may be, or may have been, different, subject to an infinite number of possibilities which, in turn, are the outcome of the vicissitudes of circumstances and personal choice. Thus, it is heuristically sterile to debate such matters as 'a waste of a young life', 'a loss of potential', and so on; yet this is the basis on which many of the opponents of voluntary euthanasia form their objections.
At the heart of human dignity is the principle of personal autonomy: we ought to be able to make decisions for ourselves, especially in those matters that touch upon our most sensitive needs and preferences. However, this is where we encounter difficulty for, as Dr Dalrymple suggests, the immature mind may not be one by which meaningful autonomy may be exercised. Given that mental maturation into adulthood may not be accomplished by most people before their mid-twenties, perhaps the age at which any decision regarding a person's future, in terms of their own life or death, ought to be arbitrarily set at twenty-five.
This does not, however, answer the question as to what, if anything, medical practitioners should reasonably do in the face of an underage person acting in a way to passively bring about his/her death. I would argue that, notwithstanding the reservations that I've expressed regarding the vulnerability of a young person, to subject that person to forced procedures to keep them alive, would be morally repugnant. In saying this, I suggest that it is not the duty of doctors to save life but, rather, to relieve human suffering: and those are two very different things.
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