Directed by Reid Davenport, a disabled filmmaker, Life After follows disabled people and their families on both sides of the United States-Canada border as they navigate medical assistance in dying.
In many understandings, the word “choice” often implies having the right, power, or opportunity to shape our future trajectories freely. But “freely” is heavy — can we have the same understanding of freedom for all? What if your future is heavily constrained by systemic inequalities or limited access to resources? Can we then truly say that everyone possesses the same right, power, or opportunity to choose their future?
I have spent a significant part of my life thinking about these questions, and smarter people than me have as well.
In the recent documentary Life After, these same ideas are explored too, but from a different perspective, one that comes from a far more marginalized lens.
Directed by Reid Davenport, a disabled filmmaker, Life After follows disabled people and their families as they navigate medical assistance in dying (MAID). Under current Canadian law, disabled individuals may request MAID if medical professionals determine that their “quality of life” is insufficient, even without a terminal illness.
Notably, these same ideas and similar legal frameworks are present a bit closer to home as well. Oregon, for instance, passed the first Death With Dignity Act in 1994, followed by Washington in 2008, allowing terminally ill patients to seek assisted death under specific conditions. Proponents of these laws maintain that they offer compassion, autonomy, and relief from prolonged suffering.
Life After, building on these ideas, contrarily argues that “assisted dying” has become less a matter of choice and more a consequence of systemic failure.
Persistent underfunding of care, lack of accessible housing and support services, bureaucratic hurdles, and social isolation severely limit the viable living options available to disabled individuals.
Davenport therefore moves beyond framing MAID as progress in human autonomy and conceptualizes the experiences around it to show how a failing care system leaves disabled people with no meaningful alternatives beyond death.
The film opens with footage of Elizabeth Bouvia, a disabled Californian who fought for the right to end her life in 1983.
After years in a psychiatric institution, where the combined pain of her cerebral palsy and arthritis left her unable to function, she sought permission to refuse food and end her life. The judge ultimately ruled that she did not have the right to request assistance in dying from the hospital.
Elizabeth is quite important for Davenport. Her story reflects a profound crisis shaped by medical and legal systems. Throughout her life, she is portrayed as a deficient woman — someone who is seen as wanting, and perhaps even needing, to be killed.
But Davenport sees the whole story differently.
For him, her story is the framework; it is the central lens that Davenport articulates his call for disabled people to retain control over their own living life. He deliberately works to decenter death in Elizabeth’s story, choosing instead to celebrate her life, and to challenge the way mass media reduced her identity to her desire to die.
One of the film’s most powerful moments also stems from Elizabeth, when Davenport’s emotions surface as he expresses hope that Elizabeth lived a full and meaningful life.
To investigate present struggles, Davenport then travels to Ontario, Canada to meet Michal Kaliszan. He is a wheelchair user and computer programmer who seriously considered applying for MAID after realizing that his only alternative was entering a long-term care institution. But with long-term care costing expensive, MAID ended up emerging as the only feasible option.
Like Elizabeth, Mike is simply another disabled individual pushed toward assisted dying as a perceived solution to the limited opportunities and supports available to him.
It is this accumulation of stories, such as Mike’s, Elizabeth’s, and those of others living with disability, that makes Life After so difficult to confront.
Davenport, however, is uniquely positioned to tell this story, able to draw openly on moments of his own despair and hope. And whatever the arguments in favor of MAID could be, whether grounded in autonomy or individual choice, Davenport chooses to strive for humans flourishing in every single condition.
Life After lingers long after viewing and truly reflects on structures that shape how we live and how we die. It is feature-length, running just under two hours, and is currently available to watch on PBS and YouTube.
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