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"Advances in biomedical technology must never come at the expense of human conscience," President Bush said yesterday (text | audio | video). "As we seek to improve human life, we must always preserve human dignity. And therefore, we must prevent human cloning by stopping it before it starts. … Allowing cloning would be taking a significant step toward a society in which human beings are grown for spare body parts, and children are engineered to custom specifications; and that's not acceptable."

The speech was aimed squarely at the U.S. Senate, which is considering a bill banning all human cloning. The U.S. House has already passed such a bill. The New York Times reports that the Senate is split 40-40 on the comprehensive ban, with 20 senators still deciding how to vote. But there's trouble on the horizon: Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) will introduce a bill banning only reproductive cloning and allowing so-called therapeutic cloning for research purposes. Sen. Sam Brownback, the sponsor of the comprehensive ban bill, says he expects a vote by Memorial Day.

Though Feinstein's bill could be spun as a "compromise" measure, Bush made it clear that it was not. Allowing therapeutic cloning would be unethical since it would "require the destruction of nascent human life," it would make a ban on reproductive cloning "virtually impossible to enforce," and it would "create a massive national market for eggs and egg donors, and exploitation of women's bodies that we cannot and must not allow." Furthermore, he said, "The benefits of research cloning are highly speculative."

One "outside adviser to the White House" on the matter tells the Times that Bush has a much stronger moral vision on this issue than he did on whether embryonic stem cells should be allowed for research purposes. "He thought stem cells was a very difficult call, morally," the adviser said. "And I think he was genuinely agonized about that. I think he thinks if he can't draw this line, no one is ever going to draw any lines."

One Senator who played heavily in both debates is Bill Frist (R-Tenn.). His support of a comprehensive ban on cloning is crucial, since he's the Senate's only physician and is widely seen as the congressional leader on issues of medical issues and bioethics. His support of a comprehensive ban, expressed both on the Senate floor Tuesday and in the op-ed page of today's Washington Post, wasn't a surprise (he has called for a ban before), but Frist doesn't always side with the prolife movement. He strongly supports embryonic stem-cell research, for example. "Regardless of our religious backgrounds, most of us remain uncomfortable with the idea of creating cloned human embryos to be destroyed in an experiment," he said. "Given the serious ethical concerns this research raises, the fact that promising embryonic stem cell research will continue even under a cloning ban, the lack of significant research in animal models and the existence of promising alternatives, I am unable to find a compelling justification for allowing human cloning today."

Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D.-S.D.) disagrees. "The president wants to ban it all," he said after the President's speech. "And I think he's wrong, and I think the American people are on our side of this issue."

Actually, they're not. Americans overwhelmingly support the comprehensive ban, as the President noted in his speech. A survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that "Americans are united in opposition to human cloning by more than four-to-one (77%-17%)." The survey also found that "support for federal funding of stem-cell research has eroded somewhat since last August," which suggests that the more people are learning about such bioethical dilemmas, the more they're siding against such experimentation. And almost half of those who still support government funds for stem-cell research say they might change their minds on the issue while those who oppose the research say they'll stick to their convictions.

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April (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46