Louis Theroux's Altered States

Louis Theroux travels to Portland, Oregon, to visit a movement seeking to rewrite the rulebook on how we conduct intimate relationships and experience family life.

Louis heads to California, one of the latest states to adopt this law, where residents can now take home a lethal overdose as long as they are terminally ill, of sound mind and strong enough to administer their own prescribed dose.

Here, Louis is invited into the family homes of those who want control over ending their own lives. But he discovers that when you have complete autonomy over your own death, choosing the right time is not such a simple decision.

Louis also meets a group who provide information about how to die to those who don't fit the legal criteria. With them, he meets a woman planning to end her life long before what would appear to be her natural time, raising complex moral and legal questions about how much control we should have over our own deaths.

Louis heads to California, the US adoption capital, where the majority of new-born adoptions are carried out privately in what is now a multi-million dollar industry.

Agencies, facilitators and lawyers can earn thousands of dollars per baby by matching pregnant women prepared to give up their newborns, with adoptive parents willing to pay up to $50,000 for a baby.

Spending time with birth mothers as they prepare to hand over their babies, Louis uncovers the stories of poverty, addiction and abuse which have informed their decision.

He also meets adoptive families who are paying out huge amounts of money in the hope of being able to raise a child they can't have by natural means. But in a system open to abuse, whether or not the birth mother hands over the baby can hang in the balance until after the birth.