Yet is it so surprising that modern bioscience should provoke renewed appeals to respect human dignity? After all, the idea of human dignity is fundamental to religious traditions that hold human beings to be created in God’s image, from which perspective it stands for a ‘culture of life’ opposed to those elements of modern bioscience that represent a ‘culture of death’ (see Bristow 1997)—which renders it is easy to agree with Pope John Paul II that the rediscovery of ‘the inviolable dignity of every human person is an essential task’. However, the new legal frameworks within which the importance of human dignity is being emphasized once more are secularized codes. Furthermore, even if ‘the bioethics movement [itself] was born in a predominantly religious cradle’ (Rae and Cox 1999:1), bioethics today is largely an exercise in applied moral philosophy in which, it has been argued, ‘religious voices no longer carry much weight’ (Rae and Cox 1999:2).