BY RICHARD DOERFLINGER

No ethical questions are more timely or controversial than those involving human life. Sometimes they bring surprising answers. In December, 1994, the director of the National Institutes of Health met with his advisers to decide the answer to one such question: Should federal funds be used for experiments on live human embryos?

One experiment of interest was a testing technique known as preimplantation genetic diagnosis. A couple at risk of having a child with cystic fibrosis or other genetic defect could have their sperm and egg combined to produce an embryo in the laboratory -- so the embryo can be tested before implantation in the womb and discarded if found "defective."

The NIH advisers saw this as a breakthrough in preventing the birth of handicapped offspring. One of them, an expert in cystic fibrosis, was surprised to learn that families with a child who has this illness were not thrilled to learn about the new procedure. One parent told her that using the technique to eliminate future offspring with cystic fibrosis would be "like saying I wish that little Johnny didn't exist, and I don't wish that."

Some judges try to improve the human condition by eliminating certain humans. In 1993, in a case involving "suicide doctor" Jack Kevorkian, Michigan Judge Richard Kaufman asked whether a constitutional right to assisted suicide could be found. He finally turned up Buck v. Bell, a long-discredited U.S. Supreme Court ruling influenced by the American eugenics movement of the 1920s. Buck v. Bell upheld the involuntary sterilization of women considered "feeble-minded." When the Nazis established their own eugenics laws in 1937, they quoted Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes' majority opinion in Buck v. Bell. Holmes authorized the sterilization of Carrie Buck with the statement: "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

Some professors of ethics have asked whether humanity can be divided into two groups: the valuable and the valueless. In his new book Rethinking Life and Death: The Collapse of Our Traditional Ethics, Australian ethicist Peter Singer proposed letting newborn infants with Down syndrome starve to death. "If we compare a severely defective human infant with a nonhuman animal, a dog or a pig, for example, we will often find the nonhuman to have superior capacities, both actual and potential, for rationality, self-consciousness, communication, and anything else that can plausibly be considered morally significant," he wrote. His book replaces the old "incoherent" Judeo-Christian sanctity of life ethic with a new set of "commandments," one of which is "All human life is not of equal worth."

The culmination of these "quality of life" ideas can be found in recent rulings on assisted suicide in two federal courts. In March the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled that seriously ill patients have a constitutional "right" to receive lethal drugs so they can commit suicide. In April, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York ruled that laws against assisted suicide for such patients "are not rationally related to any legitimate state interest."

Though defended in terms of individual freedom, the heart of both rulings is a demeaning view of the value of sick and disabled people's lives. In effect, the courts ruled that young and able-bodied people should be prevented from killing themselves because their lives have objective worth. However, when a sick or elderly person has a suicidal impulse, the state will allow others to assist the suicide because it agrees that this person's life is truly worthless.

Throwbacks to eugenics, dismissive views of people with disabilities, even Nazi ideas -- all now being presented as the "cutting edge" of legal and ethical thought.

Some Americans have complained that Pope John Paul II has a pessimistic view of the modern world, speaking as he does in Evangelium Vitae (EV) of a growing "culture of death" that threatens the weakest and most vulnerable members of the human family. But with the evidence recounted above, can anyone doubt that the culture of death is real and growing?

The Holy Father sets out a powerful intellectual case on the need to respect all human life, regardless of its age or condition. He points out that life is our first and greatest gift from God, on which every other right and gift depend. If we fail to respect and protect this gift for everyone, we will descend into a bottomless abyss of discrimination, in which the strong make self-serving decisions about whether the weak deserve to live. Ethicist Singer and his ally Ronald Green, who advises the NIH on the human embryo experiments, speak of a "Copernican revolution" in thinking about life and death, in which the intelligent and articulate members of a society should vote, on the basis of their own self-interest, on whether other members of the species deserve "personhood." Green says openly that his theory should be applied to humans after as well as before birth -- yet his theory was accepted by a 19-member NIH panel without one dissenting voice.

It is clear that more individuals and families with disabled members are needed to expose ideas about "quality of life" for what they really are: either misplaced compassion or arrogant attacks on people who need help and support.

Theologian Stanley Hauerwas says he is immune to some modern abstractions on the value of life because of his experience as the father of a child with Down syndrome. Hauerwas places matters in a human context: The people in our families have been given to us, and they depend on us to stand with them no matter what. We are not dealing here only with "life" in the abstract, but with human relationships -- with fidelity to those who need us.

This theme of fidelity is at the heart of the bishops' pastoral statement released in September, 1995, "Faithful for Life: A Moral Reflection." It deals with abortion and euthanasia in a new way: not only as violations of an individual's fight to life, but as the abandonment of the very young, very sick and very old who depend on us:

"It is for good reason that many find the roots of this disdain for life in the breakdown of the family. The family has a special role to play throughout the life of its members...The family is the first haven where those who are dependent...find their closest and surest support...At the heart of this sanctuary is fidelity -- unwavering loyalty both to those we choose and to those who have been given to us. The unraveling of that fidelity in our time leaves dependents to become lawful victims of their guardians."

The bishops note that the same shift toward individualism and away from faithfulness has affected marriage and divorce: "Men and women find it increasingly difficult to make permanent commitments to each other." And they see in this shift an enormous danger to helpless members of society:

"When a people lose confidence in fidelity between husbands and wives, it is an easy leap to imagine that other fidelities -- of parents to children, and of adult children to their elder parents -- no longer need to be permanent, for-better-or-for-worse obligations. When a family lives in fidelity it is a place of refuge and dignity, a place where each member is accepted, respected, and honored precisely because he or she is a person; and if any member is in greater need, the care which he or she receives is all the more intense...If it becomes each one only for himself or herself, then instead of being the source, school, and standard for fidelity to neighbor, the family can become the scene of its harshest violations."

In contrast to a life of self-indulgence, we are called to more demanding but richer lives of community and solidarity:

"To live in fidelity we have to rearrange our lives, yield control, and forfeit some choices. To evade the full burden of putting ourselves at the disposal of those to whom we belong, to allot them only the slack in our own agendas and not what they require, is to practice desertion by other means."

In a land of unlimited "freedom of choice," nothing is more offensive than the idea that some realities and some obligations -- like obligations to our children, our parents and other loved ones -- are simply given to us, to cope with as best we can. This is the ultimate reminder that we are not God. But recognizing such bonds is also the way for us to become fully human -- for we grow and flourish when we give ourselves to those who need us most. When we violently break these bonds of fidelity, thinking that it will make us more free, we really make ourselves shrivel up and die as persons.

We need people who depend on us for their very lives: for our own life comes to fulfillment in what the Holy Father calls "the sincere gift of self" (EV, no. 25). Any parent of a child with disabilities, indeed any parent, will admit that this gift of self can be difficult and painful. No one should sugarcoat this reality: The way to resurrection lies along the way of the cross.

As Christians, we must promote this fierce fidelity to the helpless throughout our society. All men and women are our brothers and sisters; anyone in need who comes across our path is our neighbor. We must begin with our own families and we must teach the rest of society by embodying this faithfulness in our own lives.

Richard Doerflinger is associate director for policy development, NCCB Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities, and editor of "Life at Risk: A Chronicle of Euthanasia Trends in America."