Last year more than one million signatures were gathered for a European Citizens Initiative, called ‘One of Us’ to support the right to life ‘of every human being from conception’. In the introduction of this ESHRE session I will briefly introduce the ESHRE position in this. ESHRE is especially critical of the campaign’s description of embryo research as solely ‘embryo-destructive’, a description which misrepresents the advances already achieved in stem cell research, or indeed in the world’s five million babies conceived by reproductive technologies. A different opinion in this matter is important with respect to Horizon  2020, the EU’s research funding programme for the period 2014- 2020, whose (slightly reduced) budget of €70 billion was approved last September. Previous negotiations in 2006 cut the scope of stem cell research eligible for EU funding by excluding research on embryos or the creation of new embryonic (hESC) cell lines – and it now seems likely that the same restrictive rules will apply in Horizon 2020. ESHRE has already described as ‘worrying’ proposals from several religious organisations to extend even further these restrictions on stem cell funding.