Berenice Saenz 

A spouse has been in a coma for eight years and kept alive on a life-support system. The parents of the person want to keep their daughter alive because they believe strongly that their child will recuperate and they believe in the sanctity of life. The spouse does not want to keep the person alive because the spouse sees no hope for recovery or a quality of life and believes firmly that the person would not have wanted to continue to live in this way or to be a burden to anyone and would have wished to die. You are the judge who has been presented with this case to determine who is right and whether or not the person should live or die.

As the judge in this situation I will incline toward the husband decision. My decision does that imply that i don’t value the spouse life, but we have to thing about what the husband has to go thru every day seeing his wife as she is. I will also consider the way that this situation is affection the husband financially, emotionally, and psychologically. 

Before I have a clear decision I will examine all the changes that can give the wife the possibility to come out of the comma as well if in the case of she will be able to be a functional human being. By functionally I mean that is she should always will be a dependent upon someone to aid her with her needs or if she will have a successful complete recovery. 

In Humanities class along the semester, we lecture and study diverse themes that help me to conclude my decision more thoroughly and complex. 

Marginalized Voices unit we talk about racial, gender, and ethnicity. We talk and read stories that help me understand the necessities that people suffered thru. This section applies to this case since here the wife is the marginal voice, but what about the husband that has to go thru all the suffering and consequences that he will face in the future. In About Men, they don’t know how to bring their tenderness into the house and the lack of vocabulary to express the complexity of what they feel”. The husband does not be to disconnect his wife just because he is acting upon an act of love to her. Because, he is probably hurt to see her suffer that way she is even if he does not let the world know about it.

Freedom and Responsibility we talk about people who wants to be free and that they are responsible to get the freedom they want. On the Second Treatise of Government it says, “The executive law of nature, I doubt to be objected, that it is unreasonable for men to be the judge in their own cases, that self-love will make partial to themselves and their friends”. The husband has the right by nature to do what it will provide him self-love he cannot be condemn to be next to a wife who is suffering of a comma in which she should not even will wake up.

Death unit was appealing to me since death will always be a mystery until you faced, when you time has arrived. In the Introduction to Death it talks about, “ to examined the nature of our existence through our definitions of its end: and how we choose, if you will, to understand and value life as we reflect upon and represent its necessary conclusion death”. This helps me support the idea of unplugging the wife from life support since I believe that the husband knows his wife well enough to know that she will not like to live that way she is now. I think about the fact that we all expect to live an extended life, but I believe that not everyone will like to be planted in a bed more several years and expect that to be the life you wanted. We all want a life full of activities either emotionally or physically we want to feel and know what happening around us also we what to interact and be respond back. I set myself in the position of being in a comma and surely that is not how I want my life to end up like.

The last section we have gone thru is Sacred Text unit which is full of religious belief about life creation and how we all function because of a creator. The how the creator has set a purpose for humans to function in his world and that we should recognize that we all have a powerful one that has choose to create us and that we should worshiped. In the introduction to Sacred Text a quote by Thomas Paine states, “ I put the following work under your protection. It contains my opinion upon religion. You will do me the justice to remember, that I have always strenuously supported the right to every man to his opinion, however, different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself of his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right to change it”. The husband has the right to express his believes about his wife life even when the opinion about does not satisfy everyone else does not mean that its wrong. The husband needs to thing about his future, and what he will do with his life after the wife death putting his opinion does not makes him want to kill his wife in the contrary he tries to make it better for both of them.

Reflection

At first I register for this course because it requires me to take a Humanities class. Even on the first day of school our professor ask, who was in the class just for a grade does were my thought at the beginning. I was wrong I had obtained valuable information about the world humanities. Not necessary from learning every single piece that we had to read but from what the piece has to say about life and how it provides examples either my experiences or be believes. 

I related myself more to two of the units topics the first one is the Marginated voices which one of the pieces talk about how the American with Hispanic ancestry had evolution the way to communicate among them. Also, the Death unit this one in particular make me think about what is about life that make us think that we are prepare to die. How we have to prepare ourself in order to received, but there is no way we can have answers to do questions since once you are death there is no way to go back. Now after this course, the way I think about humans has change in a way that now I can realize that everything happens for a reason people has ti suffer in the past in order for us to have what we have now. There are more things that go beyond our understating, but that does not mean that they are wrong in the contrary we should take them in consideration in order to increase our belief and doubts.