Aggregated News

Frustrated by Congress's failure to ban human cloning or place even modest limits on human embryo research, a group of influential conservatives have drafted a broad "bioethics agenda" for President Bush's second term and have begun the delicate task of building a political coalition to support it.

The loose-knit group of about a dozen people -- largely spearheaded by Leon R. Kass, chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, and Eric Cohen, editor of the New Atlantis, a conservative journal of technology and society -- have been meeting since December. Their goal, according to a document circulating among members and others, is to devise "a bold and plausible 'offensive' bioethics agenda" to replace a congressional strategy that has been "too narrowly focused and insufficiently ambitious."

"We have today an administration and a Congress as friendly to human life and human dignity as we are likely to have for many years to come," reads the document, which was obtained by The Washington Post. "It would be tragic if we failed to take advantage of this rare opportunity to enact significant bans...