Calls for swift delivery of ACT assisted dying laws to avoid further heartbreak

A Canberra father and daughter know first hand the personal toll exacted when a terminally ill person’s mission to end their life on their own terms sets them on a collision course with faith.

Canberra couple Jim and Ros Williams before Ros chose to die on her own terms rather than suffer through the end stages of motor neurone disease.

Canberra father and daughter Jim Williams and Corrine Vale know first hand the personal toll exacted when a terminally ill person’s mission to end their life on their own terms sets them on a collision course with faith.

Jim’s wife of 50 years, Ros Williams, was in the advanced stages of motor neurone disease when she took her own life in April last year after she deliberately consumed a substance she is believed to have obtained from right-to-die advocates.

Her death at 72 left her family shattered, but what broke them was the intervention of Catholic health provider Calvary to prevent her from executing her end-of-life plan and the invasive police inquiries that followed.

Ahead of the ACT government’s inquiry examining the ­nation’s most liberal voluntary assisted dying framework beginning on Monday, the family has called on the parliament to pass the legislation without delay.

They’ve also urged the Labor-Greens government to carefully balance provisions to protect conscientious objectors with robust safeguards against meddling from religious institutions that oppose assisted dying.

Ros Williams around the time of her 70th birthday.

Ms Vale said her mother had made it clear she would have chosen VAD had it been available, saying that she did not want to live to experience the progressive paralysis and “loss of dignity”.

“She wanted to die with dignity, to choose the time that she had enough,” she told The Weekend Australian.

“And so in the absence of voluntary assisted dying, quite early on in the piece, before she’d spoken to any of us, she was researching options to take her own life as essentially a fallback option.

“Because she felt that she really needed to know that if there was no other option that met her needs that she had that available to her. And in the end, that’s what she did.”

Ms Williams made an arrangement with her palliative care team at Clare Holland House that she would stop eating, after which her doctors would begin sedation until she lost consciousness, likely causing her painless death after a week. But the Catholic health provider’s management intervened when they learned of the plan and forbade its staff from taking part.

Calvary declined to comment.

Professor Williams said his wife instead obtained a substance to end her life when her disease progressed.

“She had to do what she had to do because if you waited a week … she was having trouble breathing, she couldn’t move any of the lower part of the body and she had very limited movement of her arms and fingers, she couldn’t close them,” he said.

“She realised that if she was going to do it, she had to do it then. Whereas if there had been a plan, she may have decided to leave it a few weeks.”

Even though her actions had been of her own doing, police declared their home a crime scene, interviewing members of the family and confiscating their devices in a fallout the family agreed was “traumatic”.

Ms Vale said the VAD framework – which contains no estimated timeline for death and allows social workers and counsellors to initiate conversations about assisted dying – needed to be implemented urgently.

“We think the most important thing is it’s passed really quickly so other people don’t have to suffer the way that Mum did.”