What they said about cloning and stem cells

When a US president makes an important announcement - like George W Bush's on stem cells - you can expect the American media to sit up and take notice. Combine it with a story about Severino Antinori and nearly the whole world goes mad about cloning.

An opinion piece in the Independent suggests that Bush had 'political debts owed not only to the Conservative right, but [also] to big business'. But other commentators have suggested that his dilemma was rather more local: between his own pro-life view that life from conception should be protected and voices, like Nancy Reagan's, crying out for cures and treatments.

The conclusion that the New York Times draws is that President Bush was, and is, waffling. The Independent thinks he's cowardly and describes the decision as 'paltry and half-hearted'. But William Jefferson Bush, writing in the New York Times, considers Bush to be rather more calculating than we think. 'Like Bill Clinton before him, he has developed a gift for wriggling out of controversies by seizing the initiative and creating a third option. The best way for a president to remain popular is to look as if he's taking the road that rises above it all.'

But whilst American commentators concentrated upon Bush and stem cells, their British counterparts opted for the sexier story: cloned babies. Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks opposes cloning because it devalues humans. 'Would love survive? Would a world of clones still be a human world? I doubt it.'

Mary Riddell, writing in the Observer, begs to differ. She thinks we should get cloning into perspective. One in three children in the UK lives in poverty. Let's concern ourselves with them, she says, rather than with those who might - or might not - be born.

All the opinion pieces mentioned in this Commentary are referred to in full in Recommends.