(LifeSiteNews) — 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.