That's not good. If I were in bad shape and unable to communicate, I would rather have my wife decide than for some government official to decide. ...don't even think I should have to notify some public official in writing (by will or whatever) in advance, either. Well, if you trust your wife give her a handwritten power of attorney (the recommended language for your state is almost certainly available on-line, though I don't know exactly where). On the other hand, I hope you would recognize that for the government to give blanket power to all spouses in such matters would result in people being able to murder their spouses with impunity.
My point is that husbands, wives and children are in better hands depending on each other than on judicial officials.
All kinds of feminism, including domestic violence victimology (media saturated every hour about Scott Peterson, Michael Schiavo, and the like), are harmful to families and to our nation. Putting the fate of the family so much in the hands of the government is not the answer. It plays into the hands of socialists (especially those of Marxist feminists).
"Then it will be plain that the first condition for the liberation of the wife is to bring the whole female sex back into public industry, and that this in turn demands the abolition of the monogamous family as the economic unit of society" (Frederick Engels, "Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State").
Mao's Little Red Book on Women
http://www.paulnoll.com/China/Mao/Mao-31-Women.html
Some of Lenin's words on women
http://www.marx.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/nov/06.htm
The following is from the "Manifesto of the Communist Party" (Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Fredrick Engels)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm
"The bourgeois sees his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women."
He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production.
For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of our bourgeois at the community of women which, they pretend, is to be openly and officially established by the Communists. The Communists have no need to introduce free love; it has existed almost from time immemorial."
Everyone who knows anything of history also knows that great social revolutions are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress may be measured precisely by the social position of the fair sex (plain ones included) (Karl Marx Letter to Ludwig Kugelmann, MECW, Volume 43, p. 184,
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1868/letters/68_12_12.htm)