New biotechnologies are providing new capacities for altering human reproduction, especially with life initiated outside the body. The intersection of assisted reproduction with techniques of genetic screening and sex selection confronts patients with a daunting array of new opportunities and dilemmas, while possible changes in human reproduction may have great significance for society as a whole. Concerned people wonder whether we can govern the uses of these biotechnologies, enabling them to serve worthy ends without compromising human freedom and dignity.

Doing so will be difficult. Our ethical reflections and regulatory institutions have lagged behind our rapid technological advance. Moreover, issues surrounding human reproduction, touching deep questions of sex and family, freedom and responsibility, arouse deep public disagreement--witness abortion, embryo research and human cloning. People on different sides of the issues have opposed governmental regulation, either because they want to protect biomedical research and medical progress or because they do not wish to sanction the activity being regulated.

In its report, "Reproduction and Responsibility," released today, the President's Council on Bioethics offers a way forward. Although our members are on different sides of many contested questions, the council has coalesced to make a series of unanimous recommendations aimed at improving public oversight and establishing public boundaries in the area of reproductive biotechnology.

Unfortunately, incomplete and therefore misleading news stories written before the report's release might give the impression that the council's unanimity extends also to the still-contested matters of embryonic stem-cell research and federal funding. This is not the case. As the personal statements that accompany the report make clear, the divisions on the council about these very controversial matters remain deep. Instead, what we offer in this report is a concrete set of proposals that people on the different sides of the embryo debates can all accept for their own principled reasons, and without foreclosing their crucial ongoing argument.

We disagree on much, but by seeking for common ground, we have found that we also agree on much that matters. In this spirit, the council's report does three things:

• First, the report offers a comprehensive review of current regulatory activities--especially where new techniques of assisted reproduction intersect with growing genetic knowledge. While there is some existing regulation and some oversight in place, there are also great gaps. Indeed, there is today no public authority responsible for monitoring or overseeing how these technologies make their way from the experimental to the clinical stage or how they affect the health and well-being of the women who use them or the children born with their aid. To begin to address these gaps and uncertainties, we recommend a series of federally funded studies and improved data gathering.
  
• Second, we summon the professional societies of reproductive medicine to improve their own systems of oversight and self-regulation-specifically, to ensure the safety of novel technologies, to ensure informed consent of patients, and to augment self-imposed ethical guidelines and improve their enforcement.
  
• Third, the council recommends a series of legislative moratoria to erect barriers against some radical reproductive practices that would threaten widely shared values, innovations that should not be allowed to happen simply because of public inattention and inaction or in the absence of prior public deliberation. These practices include placing human embryos into animal uteruses; initiating a human pregnancy for research purposes or to secure body parts; or producing an embryo using animal sperm and a human egg (or the converse).

They also include potential radical ways of conceiving a child that would deny to the child the normal connection to adult biological progenitors: the conception of a child using gametes derived from aborted fetuses or embryonic stem cells, and the conception of a child in any way other than by union of egg and sperm. This last recommendation, if enacted, would effectively prohibit cloning to produce children (while neither endorsing nor prohibiting the creation of cloned embryos for research).

On this hot public issue, some elaboration is needed. Our proposal here is fundamentally different from the cloning bans now before Congress--one of which would ban the creation of cloned embryos for any purpose, and the other of which would endorse research cloning and prohibit the transfer of cloned embryos to initiate a pregnancy, thus mandating that all cloned embryos be destroyed. Our recommendation does neither of these things: It neither prohibits nor endorses the creation of cloned embryos for research; on this question it is silent. It does not create a class of embryos that must be destroyed or prohibit the transfer of cloned embryos were they do exist. Rather, it would prohibit the act of creating cloned embryos with the intent of initiating a pregnancy.

In the council's earlier report on human cloning, we unanimously called for a ban on cloning to produce children (a call we repeat and clarify), while on cloning for research, a majority called for a moratorium and a minority recommended that the practice should proceed with regulation. We have not changed our mind in this report.

Finally, the report recommends a moratorium on the buying, selling or patenting of human embryos for any reason, and a moratorium on research that uses later-stage human embryos once they have reached the 10- to 14-day stage of development.

Regarding embryo research in earlier stages--like those stages when embryonic stem cells are derived-the nation and the council are divided. Some members continue to believe all embryo research should be restricted or banned; other members believe embryo research should be federally funded.

But everyone on the council agrees that research on embryos at the later stage (after 10 to 14 days) is either wrong or imprudent, and should be prohibited. In calling for such a prohibition, the council neither endorses federal funding for embryo research nor proposes limitations on research conducted with the very earliest stage embryos. On these still contested matters we remain silent, while agreeing to curtail a practice that everyone believes should be restricted.

The fact that our very diverse council was able to find principled common ground and achieve this unanimity gives us hope that some agreement may be possible in Congress, and that important ongoing arguments about related issues need not permanently prevent us from setting sensible rules and standards in this domain of increasing human and social import.

Leon R. Kass is the Hertog Fellow at AEI and chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics.