(Oregon Right to Life) — A new PBS documentary by award-winning filmmaker Reid Davenport sheds light on the impact of legal assisted suicide, underscoring the way the “right to die” movement creates pressure for people with disabilities to seek assisted suicide rather than receive life-affirming care and support.
In “Life After,” which premiered November 3rd, 2025, Davenport – who has a disability and makes documentaries from a disability rights perspective – begins by telling the story of Elizabeth Bouvia, a woman who became a central figure in the “right to die” movement in the 1980s. Born with cerebral palsy and a quadriplegic, Bouvia made headlines when she sought to have hospital staff at California’s Riverside General Hospital allow her to commit suicide by starving herself to death. Her situation culminated in a court case, in which she was represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The court ruled that she did not have a “right to die.”
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Despite that ruling, states including California, Oregon, and Washington have gone on to enact laws permitting assisted suicide. The laws are technically meant to apply only to people with terminal illnesses, but loopholes have enabled lethal prescriptions for people suffering from conditions including arthritis and anorexia.
In Canada, the government has gone even further, legalizing “Medical Assistance in Dying” (MAID) in 2016. The passage of the law, Canadian journalist Ash Kelly said in the documentary, “was seen as a progressive legislation, a move forward, because the process only allowed for people [to access MAID] if they had a reasonably foreseeable death.”
That changed, she said, when a Quebec court directed the Canadian government “to broaden the legislation to allow people to access MAID even if they weren’t going to die in the immediate or foreseeable future. And that includes people living with disabilities.”
In practice, the legalization has led to Canadians with disabilities feeling pressured – either by medical staff or even their own financial circumstances – to access MAID rather than pursue life-sustaining care.
“It looked like my only choice was between long-term care and MAID, and in my mind, MAID is the lesser evil,” Canada resident Michal Kaliszan, who was born with spinal muscular atrophy, said in the documentary. “I didn’t want to really end my life, but, you know, it really just came down to a matter of funding at that point.”
“There is a facade of universal healthcare in this country that claims to take care of anyone who gets ill,” Kelly said. “But the truth is, we have these points of crisis in our healthcare system where people are falling through – not cracks, but massive openings in the system.”
The documentary highlighted the introduction of Bill C-7, a proposed addendum to the existing legislation to formally broaden Canada’s MAID regime. Disability advocates, as well as disabled Canadians, spoke out against the addendum, arguing that it posed serious dangers.
Summarizing their concerns, Kelly said the addendum could “open up this quagmire where people with disabilities could be pressured to access MAID instead of receiving the proper supports and services.”
“It looks as though the government is rushing legislation to allow people the right to die without also supporting the right to live,” disability rights advocate Sarah Jama said in video testimony shown in the documentary. “And that’s where I get worried.”
Krista Carr, another disability rights advocate, testified that expanding Canada’s MAID to allow people with non-terminal disabilities to access assisted suicide amounts to “singling out one group of Canadians, and saying, ‘Boy, it must be terrible to live your life. We think it’s so terrible that we’re going to assist you to end it.’”
Bill C-7 was signed into law in March of 2021.
Davenport, who won awards at the Sundance Film Festival and Independent Spirit Awards in 2022 and 2023, respectively, admitted in the documentary that he isn’t opposed to assisted suicide. However, he said that “it worries me to put so much power into doctors’ hands, because they still treat every ailment, every disability, as a deficit. And if they can’t fix it, they want to eliminate.”
“It’s not just a slippery slope,” Alex Thompson of the disability rights group Not Dead Yet said in response to whether he thought that Canada’s MAID regime would expand into the U.S. “The health system is basically going to tell you, ‘You should kill youself,”
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Assisted suicide is currently legal in twelve U.S. states, Washington, D.C., Canada, and numerous European countries, including Switzerland.
Oregon was the first state in the nation to legalize physician-assisted suicide under the euphemistically titled “Death With Dignity Act,” which was passed in 1994 and took effect in 1997. The law allows physicians to prescribe lethal drugs to patients diagnosed with a terminal illness and given six months or fewer to live. In 2023, Democratic Governor Tina Kotek signed a law stripping away the DWDA’s residency requirement, allowing Oregon physicians to prescribe lethal drugs to people who travel to Oregon from other states. The rate of assisted suicide prescriptions has increased over time, with a 30% jump in 2023 followed by an 8% increase the following year. In 2024, assisted suicides made up about one in every 100 deaths statewide.
Loopholes in Oregon’s DWDA criteria have reportedly allowed physicians to prescribe death-inducing drugs to patients for a broad swath of reasons, including diabetes, arthritis, and even anorexia.
Pro-life advocates strongly opposed the legalization and expansion of assisted suicide, noting that the practice is opposed to the dignity and sanctity of human life; that, in practice, it leads from the alleged “right to die” to an implicit “duty to die”; and that it unnecessarily opens avenues for coercion, manipulation, and abuse.
