Is Assisted Suicide About Autonomy or Coercion?

Reid Davenport’s new documentary Life After intervenes in a contentious debate around assisted suicide. The film offers a timely and critical look at the issue through interviews with disabled people, their loved ones, and advocates, as well as Davenport’s personal reflections, informed by his lived experience as a disabled person.

Currently authorized in 11 states and Washington, D.C., as well as Canada and some European nations, medical aid in dying is typically framed as a humane option for individuals with terminal illnesses that cause significant pain and suffering.

But increasingly, disability rights advocates have been sounding the alarm about a more sinister side of the issue: The risk that disabled people could be coerced into assisted suicide or left feeling like there is no other option due to medical neglect, the devaluing and fear of disabled lives, and a lack of critical social support, which leads to disproportionately high rates of poverty and homelessness. These issues are expected to worsen in the U.S. as the Trump administration pushes sweeping cuts to social services and seeks to criminalize homelessness.

Life After warns that the concern that assisted suicide could be weaponized against disabled people is far from theoretical. Since Canada expanded access to assisted suicide to individuals with certain non-terminal illnesses or disabilities in 2021, some have reported feeling compelled by health care providers to pursue it as a cost-saving measure. This year, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities asked Canada to roll back that legislation, calling it a “systemic failure” that Canadians had begun to access assisted suicide “due to unmet needs.” A lack of reporting in the U.S. makes it difficult to gauge the number of non-terminal disabled people who may have similarly accessed assisted suicide in the country, according to Davenport.

Truthout caught up with Davenport while he was on a 10-city theatrical tour to discuss responses to the film, how the Trump administration’s policies will force more disabled people into poverty in the U.S., and how the fight for disabled lives is intertwined with struggles for racial justice and the rights of immigrants and LGBTQ+ people. The interview that follows has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Marianne Dhenin: When I watched Life After, I was worried that it was going to be an upsetting experience for me as a disabled person. It can be difficult to watch mainstream coverage of assisted suicide because it often frames the premature deaths of disabled people as inevitable or even worth celebrating.

Your film offers the example of Jerika Bolen, a 14-year-old disabled Black girl who died in 2016 after requesting help to end her life, even though her medical condition would likely not have resulted in death for decades. Much of the media coverage in that case seemed to project non-disabled people’s fears about disabled life onto Bolen to render her death righteous, while dismissing the concerns of disability rights advocates, including self-advocates living with the same condition as Bolen.

But when I finished watching Life After, I said to myself, “Wait, that was a good experience for me as a disabled person.” It struck me how much of a difference it makes when someone with your perspective tells this story, so let’s start there. What’s unique about the approach that this film takes to the issue of assisted suicide?

Reid Davenport: I think what’s different is that I am taking a progressive stance against assisted suicide. It’s also not really a survey film; it actually goes deeper and deeper down this hole of how disabled people are being marginalized and forced into poverty and early death. It’s like an Alice in Wonderland structure, and that breaks convention.

You used the word “progressive,” and I think some might assume that the only progressive stance on assisted suicide is the one taken by groups like the Hemlock Society, whose origins you explore in Life After. That group was active from 1980 to 2003 and is a predecessor to today’s nonprofit Compassion & Choices, which advocates for expanding access to assisted suicide in the U.S. under the banner of protecting patients’ rights. Why is the film’s position, which is in some ways opposite to that of those advocacy groups, a progressive one?

The film is unique in that I am coming from a progressive stance, and that stance is against assisted suicide. I think progressives strive to ensure bodily autonomy, such as being pro-choice in terms of abortion. Being against assisted suicide may seem inconsistent with bodily autonomy, but I think in this society, it’s quite the opposite. We have a public sector that legislates disabled people into poverty, and a private sector that won’t allow them in. Disabled people aren’t being given bodily autonomy in how they live, so they are forced into decisions such as being institutionalized, being poor, or accessing assisted death.

The interviews in the film help detail how disabled people can be robbed of bodily autonomy, excluded from public life, and left with a sense that assisted suicide could be their only option due to a lack of support. What are some of the issues that force disabled people into that desperate situation in the U.S.?

The public sector supports that are available already impoverish disabled people because, in order to qualify, there is a limit to the amount of money a person can earn per month or hold in their name. In many cases, the public money that disabled people receive isn’t even enough to allow them to live at the poverty line. Right now, we have so many disabled people deep, deep in poverty.

With these Medicaid cuts that are going to go into effect after the current administration has left office, disabled people will fall deeper into poverty, end up on the street, and go into institutions, and many will die prematurely.

What are some of the non-governmental factors that contribute to the exclusion of disabled people?

I think community is lacking for everyone these days, and for disabled people, it is more acute because of access barriers and social stigma that won’t allow them into public life. For instance, I think the real unemployment rate among disabled people is around 70 to 80 percent. The Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn’t reflect that number because it doesn’t count people who, for instance, have given up looking for employment. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is woefully undercounting people with disabilities who are unemployed.

I also think that if you want to have a community of disabled people, it’s hard to seek them out. There are more and more disability communities out there, but they tend to be in urban settings, and obviously, not everybody lives in the city. With COVID-19 concerns, that’s another barrier to building community. I think it’s daunting to create a community, and there are barriers to access.

Life After debuted at Sundance in January 2025 and won the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award. What has the response been, and what do you think people are taking away from the film?

I’ve been really amazed at how many people get it right away, and they are not necessarily hung up on us taking an anti-assisted suicide stance. They get it.

That was a surprise because I thought it was going to be contentious. I thought people had their beliefs, and that we were threatening the stability of their beliefs, and it was going to be hard to make inroads. But I haven’t found that at all.

People recognize how profit-driven the health care system is in the U.S., so I don’t think that there is any issue with seeing how these kinds of [expanded access to assisted suicide] laws could come into the U.S. Last year, a state law was introduced in California that mirrored the law in Canada.

I’m not sure if [that same legislation] will come to the U.S., but I am sure that no matter how many safeguards we put into place around assisted suicide, disabled people who are not necessarily terminal will access assisted suicide. One of the pitfalls of the U.S. versions of this legislation is that there is a lack of reporting requirements, and that allows for abuse. It allows for disabled people who are not dying to access assisted suicide.

I also went away with a renewed sense of the importance of building disability community, both in terms of having a place to feel at home and in terms of building political power. What do you think is the significance of building solidarity in the disability community and between movements in the U.S. now, considering the increasing threats all marginalized groups are facing?

Disabled people are a marginalized community, similar to people of color, queer people, and immigrants. We have overlapping rights, and heightening the respective rights for one group will heighten them for all groups.

Note: Life After will air on PBS Independent Lens in November.

This story was originally published by Truthout.