It’s arguably been over 40 years since America had a major discussion about assisted suicide.
The issue became part of the public consciousness in 1981 with the release of the film version of Whose Life Is It Anyway?, in which Richard Dreyfus played a man paralyzed after a crash who wanted the right to end his own life. Two years later, that dramatic theoretical scenario gained a very real-life analog when Elizabeth Bouvia sued Riverside General Hospital in California. She requested that they be instructed to remove the feeding tube they had forced her onto and that they allow her to die, rather than continue living with the severe arthritis and cerebral palsy that afflicted her. For a while, the case was a cause célèbre, and Bouvia was a fixture on the national news.
And then she disappeared.
In his new documentary, Life After, filmmaker Reid Davenport asks a very simple question: What happened to this woman whose personal pain became a legal precedent?
Davenport brings the film to AFS Cinema this week as part of the Doc Nights series, and on the surface it’s very much a mystery about what happened to Bouvia. The filmmaker first heard about the case in 2017 and was astonished to discover that Bouvia’s Wikipedia page said she was still alive. That fact was what set him on the path to making this documentary. “To have this public figure disappear, there was something very compelling about this.” However, he added, “the mystery was never the binary of ‘is she alive or is she dead?’ The mystery was always ‘what happened to her?’”
As Davenport began his research, he found many interviews with Bouvia, including a famous conversation from her hospital bed with Mike Wallace for 60 Minutes. Davenport actually spent a year in production before reaching out to her family, and was very transparent about the nature of the documentary. He explained, “They very justifiably didn’t want their sister’s reputation to be dragged through the dirt again, and we did our best to reassure them that that was not our goal.”
However, while Life After begins as an exploration of what happened to Bouvia post-trial, it also discusses the quiet growth of what is known as medical aid in dying (MAID) legislation. Four decades plus since Whose Life Is It Anyway?, Life After has become part of a larger conversation about MAID as legislation is now on the books in 11 states, the District of Columbia, and Canada. Pedro Almodóvar tackled the subject through drama earlier this year in The Room Next Door, while South by Southwest-selected documentary Other Side focused on a different real-life lawsuit, as Connecticut resident Lynda Bluestein fought for access to Vermont’s MAID legislation.
In his documentary, Davenport is looking specifically at what MAID means for people with disabilities. As he started talking to people who had applied for MAID and their families about their experiences, he soon found a disturbing trend of people with disabilities being pushed into a decision. He said, “I don’t think that people who are for assisted suicide really want you to hear the story of Elizabeth because it shows how willing society can be to allow a healthy disabled person to commit suicide with the assistance of the state.”
What Davenport found in Bouvia’s case and its fallout was a way to discuss how the lives of people with disabilities are valued and commoditized in a capitalist society: how medical businesses see MAID as the cheap alternative to lifelong care, and how discussions sometimes veer terrifyingly close to eugenics. “Her life illuminated a lot of the phenomenon of ableism,” Davenport said. “Marginalized people are vulnerable as long as there are profit motives to have disabled people quote-unquote voluntarily kill themselves.”
The question then becomes: Does Davenport believe that there are any circumstances under which MAID should be acceptable? “I think assisted suicide could work in a utopia, but we’re not in a utopia,” Davenport said. “We live in a society where ableism and racism and classism are inescapable. … I am not morally opposed to suicide in general, but I think when you have mega wealthy corporations and government facilitating suicide, that’s when it becomes really dangerous.”
Life After screens at AFS Cinema on July 30 with director Reid Davenport in attendance, followed by virtual screenings July 31 and Aug. 2. Tickets and info at austinfilm.org.
This article appears in July 25 • 2025.