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United States debates over stem cell research too often take the status of the embryo as the only decisive ethical issue, assume that if the embryo cannot be shown to be a person its destruction for a good cause is justified, and are insufficiently critical of economic incentives to legitimate and fund such research. Even if stem cell research ought not be banned, it could be situated and controlled on a spectrum of other health care needs through limited funding policies; aggressive peer review; regulatory and legal oversight applying to all research, however funded; and stringent patenting criteria.

Lisa Sowle Cahill takes up the methodological issue of how substantive religious perspectives can be communicated in a pluralistic society. Cahill sees public discourse about bioethics as embodying a commitment to dialogue among traditions, religious and nonreligious, that have common concerns.

The Vatican Instruction on reproductive technologies and the OTA report, Infertility, both use "rights" language to advance quite different views of the same subject matter. The former focuses on the rights and welfare of the embryo, and the protection of the family, while the latter stresses the freedom and rights of couples. This essay uses the work of Alasdair MacIntyre and Jeffrey Stout to consider the different traditions grounding these definitions of rights. It is proposed that a potentially effective mediating language could be that of "human nature", and argued that donor methods raise more serious moral objections than homologous ones.