International
Daughter devastated to learn of mother’s assisted suicide through WhatsApp, and she’s not alone
From LifeSiteNews
An Irish mother with mental health problems killed herself under Switzerland’s permissive euthanasia regime without telling her family. Similar horror stories are happening in Canada, and the UK may be next.
Last month, Megan Royal discovered that her mother had ended her life by assisted suicide when she received a WhatsApp message from Swiss suicide center Pegasos, letting her know that her mother’s ashes would be sent to her via mail.
Fifty-eight-year-old Maureen Slough was from Cavan, Ireland, and told her family that she would be vacationing with a friend in Lithuania. Instead, the recently retired civil servant traveled to Switzerland, where the facility says she died by lethal injection, listening to a song by Elvis Presley. Her family, including her “partner” Mick Lynch, who had spoken to her the day she died, had no idea that she was planning assisted suicide.
Slough, who had suffered through the deaths of two of her daughters, attempted suicide in 2024, and her daughter Megan Royal says she was suffering mental anguish. “She had told us she was going to Lithuania, but she had confided in two people that she had other plans,” Royal told the press. “And after a series of concerned phone calls she said she would come home, but then we got the WhatsApp message to say she had died.”
The suicide cost €15,000. Several weeks later, Royal and Lynch received goodbye letters from Maureen in the mail. Royal is heartbroken and outraged.
“They should not have allowed her to make that decision on her own,” she said. “This group did not contact me, even though my mother had nominated me as next of kin. They waited until afterwards and then told me she had died listening to an Elvis Presley song.” Pegasos claims that they were provided with a letter from Royal affirming her knowledge of the suicide, verified through an email address. Royal received no email; the family says the letter was likely forged.
According to UK Right to Life, Slough’s brother Philip, a U.K. solicitor, “has written to the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, urging them to investigate the matter with the Swiss authorities … he said that Pegasos had failed to follow its own policy of informing family, adding ‘it appears my sister provided Pegasos with letters of complaint to medical authorities in Éire in respect of bogus medical conditions, and that these documents were considered by Pegasos in support of her application.’”
He continued: “While I understand that Swiss law permits assisted dying, the Pegasos clinic has faced numerous criticisms in the UK for their practices with British nationals, and the circumstances in which my sister took her life are highly questionable.” Assisted suicide has been legal in Switzerland since 1941 and is only illegal for the ambiguous reason of “selfish motives.” Switzerland has long been a destination for suicide tourism, and UK Right to Life noted that “Pegasos was at the centre of a similar controversy earlier this year when a British mother, Anne, ended her life at the Pegasos assisted suicide clinic in Switzerland without informing her family.”
Many are already observing that if Kim Leadbeater’s assisted suicide bill becomes law in the United Kingdom, similar scenarios could soon be a reality in the UK. MP Danny Kruger attempted to table an amendment earlier this year requiring people seeking assisted suicide to sign a document declaring whether they had informed their family of their plan; it was ignored.
“That is the saddest thing, which was hinted at quite strongly – in fact, stated explicitly – in some of the evidence sessions,” Kruger told the House. “It has been suggested that wanting a loved one to live is seen by doctors as a form of coercion that should be resisted; that trying to argue a loved one out of an assisted death is the coercion that we need to guard against and, on that basis, we should not be making any expectation that families are informed.”
“What a tragic thing for us to say,” he continued. “To enable doctors to issue lethal drugs that kill people without their family knowing is an absolutely tragic thing. I beg the Committee to consider what on earth we are doing allowing that.”
Kruger is not exaggerating. At a press conference in British Columbia for MP Tamara Jansen’s Bill C-218, which would ban euthanasia for those suffering from mental illness, Alicia Duncan told the gut-wrenching story of discovering that her mother had been euthanized after being hospitalized for a mental health crisis – and finding out about her mother’s death via text message.
If the House of Lords passes Kim Leadbeater’s assisted suicide bill – and if MP Tamara Jansen’s “Right to Recover Act” fails to pass this fall – stories like that of Maureen Slough will become excruciatingly common. Parliamentarians must act to protect the vulnerable. If they do not, children discovering that their parents have died by suicide and that their ashes are in the mail will no longer be a horrifying aberration, but a social norm.
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
President Donald Trump’s apparent change in tune towards Ukraine shouldn’t be taken solely at face value, and may actually serve another purpose to further pressure all parties to come to the table, foreign policy experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Trump issued a Truth Social post Tuesday saying that Ukraine was “in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form,” and that he would continue sending NATO weapons to use in Ukraine. While many in the mainstream media characterized his statement as a notable “pivot,” experts told the DCNF that Trump may be giving Ukraine and Russian President Vladimir Putin one last chance to end the war on peaceful terms, after which Trump may stand strongly behind Ukraine or wash his hands of the conflict altogether.
“I think it’s a tactical shift, but I don’t think his strategic purpose has changed,” George Beebe, director of grand strategy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told the DCNF. There are parties that insist that it must be a battlefield victory, and there are those in Russia that believe that it ought to be a battlefield victory. His answer to them is, ‘okay, you don’t want to compromise? Go ahead, pursue your battlefield victory,’ and that’s one that I don’t think any of these people have really grappled with the reality of what that really means for them.”
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“If you read carefully, he talks about NATO as if it’s some separate entity to the United States,” Beebe told the DCNF. “I think the Europeans could not have failed to pick that up. And that by itself is, from Europe’s point of view, very concerning. And Trump basically said, ‘Okay, Europe, go ahead. Go to it. You defeat this paper tiger of Russia.’ But don’t expect … the United States to come running to defend you when the Russians shoot back at you.”
The White House has claimed that Trump’s statements towards Ukraine are part of a larger negotiating tactic. Trump has continued to pressure nations buying Russian oil to change their petroleum supply, most recently urging Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan during their Oval Office meeting Thursday.
Wilson Beaver, senior policy advisor for defense budgeting and NATO policy at the Heritage Foundation, told the DCNF that his insistence on pursuing these trade negotiations surrounding the Ukraine war is evidence that Trump is nowhere near done with attempting to broker peace.
“One thing I would point to that shows just how committed he is: the tariffs put on India,” Beaver told the DCNF. “India has been making a lot of money buying oil from the Russians, and we’ve nicely asked them to stop for the past three years, and they haven’t. President Trump was frustrated with that, and he acted to try to get the Indians to stop funding Russia’s war in Ukraine, and this has had some follow-on negative effects for the U.S.-India relationship.”
When asked a question Tuesday on whether or not the president still trusted Putin to come to the peace table, Trump told reporters to wait “a month from now.” Trump also said that he would back NATO allies if Russia decided to expand its war to the rest of Europe.
This month, Russia has violated violated the airspace of Poland and Estonia multiple times, prompting condemnation from Europe and increased readiness among NATO nations for any potential escalation with Russia. Whatever Trump’s tactics are, Beaver believes his course remains steady despite perceived rhetorical changes.
“He’s very committed to a peace deal, a cease fire for Ukraine,” Beaver told the DCNF. “I think it was always in the cards that different tactics might have to be used to reach that end state, but the goal is the same.”
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
Prosecutors indicted Comey with making a false statement to Congress and obstructing a congressional investigation. Comey posted a video on Instagram to respond to the indictment and framed it as political retribution.
“My family and I have known for years that there are costs to standing up to Donald Trump, but we couldn’t imagine ourselves living any other way. We will not live on our knees, and you shouldn’t either. Somebody that I love dearly recently said that fear is the tool of a tyrant, and she’s right,” Comey said.
Comey said that neither he nor his supporters should give in to intimidation.
“I’m not afraid, and I hope you’re not either. I hope instead you are engaged, you are paying attention, and you will vote like your beloved country depends upon it, which it does. My heart is broken for the Department of Justice, but I have great confidence in the federal judicial system, and I’m innocent. So let’s have a trial and keep the faith,” Comey said.
A CIA memo released in July reveals that Comey and former CIA Director John Brennan may have given false testimony when they claimed under oath that the Steele Dossier played no role in the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA). The memo, based on a June review, directly challenges their sworn statements.
The review said that Brennan actively worked to insert the Steele Dossier into the ICA. Former British spy Christopher Steele created the dossier for Fusion GPS, a research group bankrolled by Hillary Clinton’s campaign through the law firm Perkins Coie.
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