WASHINGTON -- President Bush raised the volume on support for legislation to ban all forms of human cloning research with an April 10 White House event rallying some of the bill's most prominent backers.

"Allowing cloning would be taking a significant step toward a society in which human beings are grown for spare body parts and children are engineered to custom specifications," Bush said, "and that's not acceptable."

The Senate is expected to take up legislation on human cloning before it recesses for the summer. The House passed a bill last July that would ban all research in human cloning.

Bush said he would firmly oppose all types of cloning research involving human embryos. One bill pending action in the Senate would prohibit research in cloning for reproductive purposes, but would permit research on cloned human embryos which are destroyed after stem cells have been extracted. The president said that version is unacceptable.

The White House event followed a lobbying rally at the Capitol, at which several hundred people from religious, medical and political backgrounds heard activists explaining the distinction between the types of cloning and why they believe all forms of human cloning research are wrong.

Participants in the events included actresses Margaret Colin and Patricia Heaton, who are honorary co-chairs of Feminists for Life, Senate bill co-sponsors Sens. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., and Mary Landrieu, D-La.; representatives of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, including Gail Quinn, head of the U.S. bishops' Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities, and Richard Doerflinger, the secretariat's associate director for policy development; and Bishop Fabian W. Bruskewitz of Lincoln, Neb.

Others in attendance included medical researchers and several people with disabilities who took issue with those who argue that cloning research could help them.

"Nobody understands better than I the desire to find a cure," said Joni Eareckson Tada, a quadriplegic who became famous in part for her artwork painted by using a brush held in her mouth. In the 35 years since she became paralyzed because of a diving accident, her perspective about her situation has tempered, she said.

"It's not a question of how embryonic stem cell research would affect me, but how it would affect society" that truly matters, Tada said.

She and James Kelly, another quadriplegic who supports a total cloning ban, sought to counter the attention in support of human cloning research by actor Christopher Reeve. Reeve, who was paralyzed in a horseback riding accident, has appeared several times at congressional hearings in support of cloning and embryonic stem cell research that some scientists hope could lead to treatments or cures for people with neurological injuries.

"I find it shameful that fellow people with disabilities are using their disabilities to sway opinion," Tada said.

Kelly referred to the many deformed animals that have been created in the process of created cloned sheep, rabbits and cats and said "my skin crawls at the thought of pulling others into similar situation so I can maybe get out of mine."

At the hill briefing, Doerflinger said that although there are several bills that purport to limit human cloning "this is really only one bill here to ban cloning," the Brownback-Landrieu measure.

A background paper Doerflinger distributed at the meeting said the competing bill sponsored by Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., Tom Harkin, D-Iowa., and Arlen Specter, R-Pa., fails to attack the problems created by allowing limited human cloning research. That bill would ban only the transfer of cloned human embryos so that they may develop beyond the embryo stage. It would require that embryos developed for research purposes be destroyed.

At the White House, Bush noted that polls show "nearly every American agrees that (reproductive cloning) should be banned." Research cloning has more support, but Bush said it would "require the destruction of nascent human life."

Such experimentation "would contradict the most fundamental principle of medical ethics, that no human life should be exploited or extinguished for the benefit of another," he said.

Bush said the diverse coalition in the room affirms that "it would be a mistake for the United States Senate to allow any kind of human cloning to come out of that chamber."