Throughout the 1980s, the various Christian denominations in Britain drew upon their established systems of belief and moral principle to try to assess the legitimacy of embryo research and to offer guidance on this topic to their members. For example, in 1982, the Board of Social Responsibility of the Church of England set up a working party on human fertilization and embryology in order to ‘apply Biblical understanding and Christian ethical tradition’ to the issues arising from IVF and embryo research. Similarly, the Roman Catholic Church looked closely at embryo research during this period and issued a series of formal judgments. Although there was considerable resistance to embryo research on religious grounds, and in some quarters emphatic insistence that such research should be forbidden, the position adopted by the churches and by their members was by no means uniform and by no means consistently negative. For instance, the Archbishop of York, Primate of England, argued repeatedly on behalf of embryo research in Parliament and elsewhere. Nevertheless, despite the diversity of religious opinion, some of those in favour of research on human embryos chose to depict the public debate over the rights and wrongs of embryo research as essentially a struggle between scientific rationality and religious dogma.

This view of the debate is clearly evident in the various references by supporters of embryo research to the scientific martyrdom of Galileo at the hands of religious extremists.