“Life After” Examines the Implications of a Growing Right-to-Die Movement

By Lucy Spicer

In 1983, 26-year-old Elizabeth Bouvia checked herself into a California hospital, where she requested to be allowed to starve to death. Bouvia had cerebral palsy that left much of her body paralyzed and caused her continuous, severe pain. The hospital staff’s decision to refuse her request and initiate force-feeding led to a highly publicized legal case that ended in the court upholding the hospital’s decision. 

“I read about Elizabeth eight years ago,” says filmmaker Reid Davenport (I Didn’t See You There, 2022 Sundance Film Festival) at the post-premiere Q&A for his film Life After, which premiered January 27 at The Ray Theatre in Park City as part of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival’s U.S. Documentary Competition. “She just stayed in my mind throughout the years.” After Bouvia lost her court case — and subsequent appeal — she gave a few interviews over the years before disappearing from public view entirely. Life After begins here, with the search for Bouvia. 

Although Davenport’s quest for Bouvia (Is she alive? Has she been happy? Did she change her mind about wanting to die?) is the driving force behind the project, the documentary quickly blooms into a larger discussion about the right to die, quality of life, and the way governments and the medical community address — or don’t address — the needs of disabled people. “Going into this, it quickly became apparent that we were not making a film about assisted suicide. We were making a film about ableism,” explains Davenport. “So it starts off as assisted suicide, but underneath is all these issues that disabled people face that are never talked about.”

One of the biggest players in the film is Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) process. Hailed as progressive by its proponents, MAID is designed to assist people in ending their lives with dignity should they be in an irreversible state of decline due to a serious disease, illness, or disability. An especially memorable moment in the film sees Davenport and his producer, Colleen Cassingham, filling out an online form for MAID to see whether Davenport, who is disabled, would be eligible if he lived in Canada. As it turns out, he would be. But Davenport doesn’t want to die, which begs the question: What is it that drives disabled people to decide they want to die? The answers are damning — for many, either their pain has become unmanageable or they don’t have the financial means to afford adequate care. 

“This society [is] making death the default for disabled people,” says Davenport.

“This is something we thought so much about: How do we hold sacred people’s lives and their individual decisions about incredibly personal issues?” asks Cassingham during the Q&A. “We thought what we wanted this film to contribute was to contextualize those choices and bring a critical lens to the systems and social attitudes that shape those choices, because choice doesn’t exist in a vacuum.” 

One of the documentary’s participants could no longer afford in-home care after the Canadian government greatly reduced the budget for certain health services. If he could not come up with the finances, he determined that he would have no choice but to be institutionalized for the rest of his life. When death seems like a better option than the only care you can afford, how much of the decision is yours, really? 

“I think [Reid and I] each have a leftist politic, and we are deeply committed to issues of bodily autonomy,” says Cassingham. “But what we saw within the progressive community was a sort of cognitive dissonance around an unquestioned belief that assisted suicide and dying legislation is about choice,” she continues. “We wanted to open it up that it’s about so much more.”