Beth Mylius once asked her oncologist what her final days with terminal oesophageal cancer might look like.
"I can expect in the last 10 days that my oesophagus will block, I will not be able to have any food and, ultimately, not any water," she said.
"So I would basically die in great pain, of dehydration."
The grim prospect was something the Adelaide local wanted to avoid.
"When I get to the point of not being able to communicate, barely conscious, I hope that voluntary assisted dying would be available to me."
But, at 90, Ms Mylius never got her wish.
Despite South Australia voting to legalise euthanasia a year before she died in June 2022, the legislation has still not yet been enacted.
'Forced to suffer or take their own lives'
Under the previous Liberal government, the laws were set to come into effect in March 2023, 22 months after they passed parliament.
The state's new Labor Government told the ABC that it plans to bring the state's voluntary euthanasia law's implementation date forward from March to January 2023.
However, euthanasia campaigners argue that time frame is still too slow, and leaves many terminally ill people to suffer.
Voluntary Assisted Dying South Australia president Frances Coombe said she was regularly contacted by those wanting the choice.
"I do get distress calls nearly every week from people who are wanting to know the day when the law is going to be activated," Ms Coombe said.
"The convener of our nurse's advocacy group has said that she knows people who have taken their own lives because they don't have this choice."
Rollout date brought forward
New Health Minister Chris Picton said he was doing all he could to expedite the rollout date.
"We can at least bring that forward to the end of January, but if we can explore any avenue where we can bring that forward even more, we will absolutely do so."
Mr Picton said the slow pace was in part due to how South Australia's laws came about.
"It was [then-shadow attorney-general] Kyam Maher, who was in the opposition at the time, putting this forward as a private member's bill," Mr Picton said.
"Once the bill was passed, there wasn't anything in place from the then-government's end to start that implementation work, and it took another six months before that was being put in place."
'We don't want any accidents'
Australian Medical Association vice president Doctor Chris Moy was appointed chair of SA Health's Voluntary Assisted Dying Taskforce in January 2022.
He said that, given the delay, the taskforce was making good time on a very complicated task.
"We are talking about, for the first time, the prescribing of lethal medications on purpose," Dr Moy said.
"We don't want any accidents where people could die because they get access.
"We could talk about children, rural and remote areas, we could talk about people in a nursing home, with dementia walking into the room after somebody's taking the medications."
Dr Moy said that these situations need to be addressed because of the "incredible consequences of that".
Other states lead the way
Dr Moy said the taskforce was borrowing as much as possible from the states that had already legalised voluntary assisted dying.
"We are trying to borrow, copy and paste as much as we can from those states, to speed up the process," he said.
"But there are aspects about our legislation [that] are unique."
He said that, while South Australia's legislation closely mirrored Victoria's, the taskforce was contending with some factors that state did not have to, such as remote outback communities.
"Some of the medications have a very short use-by date," Dr Moy said.
He said federal laws criminalising electronic communication about suicide — and how they interacted with the way South Australia's legislation was structured — were further complicating things.
"We're getting legal advice about this, but an inability to do this means that we can't use telephone or email or those sorts of things to give very specific advice to, say, the doctor who is actually supporting their patient or the patient themselves."
South Australia's opposition health spokesperson, Michelle Lensink, agreed the legislation was complicated and unique.
"We have quite different laws to other jurisdictions, so the power-of-attorney laws and advanced [health] care directives are quite different in South Australia, so we need to get the interaction of all those laws right," she said.
"There's been no delay. March 2023 was set out as the rollout date, and that was on track when we left government."
