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Monitoring Stem Cell Research 
• Humans are not God. We are finite and fallible and this fact 
ought to promote humility and urge caution. 
Now if we focused merely on questions of embryo status, we 
would miss entirely these similarities between Catholic and Jewish 
views. More importantly, we would miss the fact that these 
similarities may underwrite significant moral reflection on stem cell 
research that is not rooted in concerns about the early embryo. 
For example, Dorff notes that, given Jewish theological and 
legal commitments, the provision of health care must be understood 
as a communal responsibility. Thus, access to therapies developed 
through stem cell research is a crucial issue of justice for the Jewish 
community. This theme is echoed in Laurie Zoloth's work on stem 
cell research. As Zoloth puts it: 
Research done always will mean research foregone. 
Will this research help or avoid the problem of access 
to health, given that poverty and poor health are so 
desperately intertwined in this country? . . . How can 
difficult issues of global justice and fair distribution 
be handled in research involving private enterprise? 
(Zoloth, 2001, 238) 
Surely these are questions that any Catholic moral theologian 
would gladly press. 
Indeed, attending to the similarities between Zoloth’s work and 
Catholic reflection on stem cell research brings us back to Lisa 
Cahill’s observation about debates on abortion: they tend to be too 
focused on questions of rights individually construed. When one 
shifts the frame of analysis, new and different issues and new and 
different ways to approach the same issues come into view. Notice, 
for example, how close Zoloth and Cahill are on the issue of rights. 
According to Zoloth, Jewish tradition foregrounds questions of 
"obligations, duties, and just relationships to the other, rather than 
the protection of rights, privacy, or ownership of the autonomous 
self’ (96). This leads Zoloth to ask: "Can the interests of the 
vulnerable be heard in our debate?" (105). To be sure, the American 
bishops have wanted to emphasize the vulnerability of the early 
embryo when they have asked this question, but Catholic tradition, 
like Jewish tradition, requires that we ask this question in a way that 
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