Dr Hannah Gould

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616 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 19 Jul

Dr Hannah Gould’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Humans, being. with Lael Stone · Dr Hannah Gould, being. with Lael Stone | Death Is Not an Emergency ♥︎ · 19 Jul 2026 podcast

So VAD is legal currently in every state and territory in Australia, except for the Northern Territory.

There's been some movement to have it introduced in the Northern Territory.

Ironically, the Northern Territory was the first in the world to legalize it back in the 90s.

What happened?

So the federal government at the time then overruled them.

So it was legal for about two weeks in 1995.

So it's legal in every state and territory, and where I live in Victoria it's been practiced for over ten years.

Now, there's a lot of restrictions around it, obviously.

So you have to be within kind of 12 months of being expected to die or six months of being expected to lose your capacity through motor neuron disease.

And you have to have multiple doctors sign off on it.

And you have to demonstrate that you can give informed consent.

You have to be an adult and all these other kind of requirements to make sure that it's quite restricted and safe.

My position on VAD has always been that I think it is possible to have a system of VAD that respects people's autonomy and respects their kind of control over their body and who they are and their mind, whilst also having a really good system of palliative care.

So I think one of the kind of struggles in this area is that VAD is often pitted against having great palliative care.

People worry that if we legalize VAD, we're just going to force people to die, right?

That older people are going to feel like they're a burden, people with disabilities are going to feel like they're a burden, people are going to feel like, oh, you know, no one wants to look after me anymore, I'm just going to access it.

or that we're not going to invest in palliative care because we have a system of VAD.

And I just don't think that's the case.

I think we can do both.

What I think it speaks to, though, is an emerging value in our contemporary death culture, which is very much about what we've been talking already, which is about individual expression and people having kind of self-determination

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