Los Angeles Times
WASHINGTON — President Bush will intensify his push today for a comprehensive ban on human cloning, raising the temperature in a debate that has been smoldering at the crossroads of ethics and science.
In a speech in the White House Rose Garden, Bush is expected to urge the Senate to ban cloning as a potential method for creating children and as a tool for research into cures for disease.
But the approaching Senate debate is presenting him with a political challenge even more complex than the emotional battle over stem cell research that divided his administration last summer.
Then, Bush fashioned a compromise on the sharply polarizing issue of federal support for stem cell research. Although he failed to fully satisfy either scientists who supported the research or religious conservatives who opposed it, he found a middle ground that largely defused the controversy.
Now, though, both sides agree there is no obvious compromise available between those who want to ban all human cloning, and those who would permit cloning for medical research while barring it for reproduction.
Bush has sided squarely with advocates of the comprehensive ban. But he has much less leverage than he did in the stem cell controversy to steer the debate toward his desired outcome.
In the stem cell decision, Bush used his executive powers to limit the federal government’s involvement in the controversial research. But a cloning ban will require congressional action. And while the House has passed the comprehensive ban that Bush and conservative groups favor, advocates of cloning in disease research — often called "therapeutic" cloning — are cautiously optimistic they have the votes they need to block a total ban in the Senate.
That could produce a legislative deadlock and leave the United States as one of the few Western nations without a ban on reproductive cloning — an outcome hardly anyone on the political spectrum supports.
"If in fact nothing happens, it leaves us in a difficult and very unfortunate place," said one White House official who asked not to be identified.
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