In this final talk of the session on “Human embryos for Health and Research”, the focus will be on the ethics of embryo donation for stem cell research. The motives of people who choose to donate embryos for research will be briefly discussed, as will the variety of legislations on embryo research within Europe. National legislators, as well as the European Parliament, the European Patent Office and the European Court of Justice have had to make decisions relating to what is or is not allowed in the field of human embryonic stem cell research and patenting, and their decisions are often difficult to reconcile. In order to understand this divergence and the specific restrictions that different regulators impose, insight is needed into the different opinions regarding the moral status of the pre-implantation embryo (blastocyst), into the moral distinction between using IVF embryos donated for research versus creating embryos for research purposes, and into the moral distinction between producing and using embryonic stem cell lines for non-commercial research and allowing such production and research in a commercial or industrial setting.