Breaking away from more conservative groups, the American Bar Association (ABA) voted last week in favor of a policy that opposes any government ban on cloning for medical research, and condemns legislation that would criminalize scientists who pursue medical cloning research.

"Members overwhelmingly agreed with the policy," said policy author, Robyn Shapiro, director of the Center for the Study of Bioethics at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. "This outcome shows that there is a growing support throughout the nation for this position."

The House of Delegates, the ABA's policy-making body, approved the resolution by voice vote during its annual meeting in Washington. Lawyers who drafted the policy wrote: "Governmental action that would ban all forms of cloning, and thereby foreclose all potential avenues of medical advancement offered by therapeutic cloning, poses a direct and serious threat to freedom of scientific inquiry."

The new ABA stance is at odds with the Bush administration, which favors a permanent ban on cloning for any purpose, including medical research. The US House of Representatives passed a bill last year that would institute such a ban, but the issue is currently stalled in the Senate.

Shapiro said that the new policy would enable the ABA's 408,000 members to lobby Congress and testify on Capitol Hill against a permanent cloning ban. "It will also allow us to give input on appropriate safeguards and ethics for such research," she said. The policy opposes any government effort to punish those who pursue such research and makes clear that the research must be conducted with proper legal, ethical and research safeguards.

But not all ABA members see the new policy as a move in the right direction. Rebecca Dresser, a law professor at Washington University in St Louis, believes the ABA's decision is premature. The policy does not address the primary ethical and policy questions raised by cloning for biomedical research; it [the policy] refers to 'accepted safeguards', but there are no accepted safeguards governing this type of research, she said.

Instead, Dresser favors a four-year moratorium on cloning research to allow for further public debate. As a member of Bush's Council on Bioethics, she recently recommended the freeze on research and believes it's a better option than a complete ban. "There are many questions that require attention before scientists go forward with the creation of embryos to obtain stem cells for research. We need a lot more talk before making firm decisions."