Stylist columnist Lucy Mangan is proud that Britain is supporting scientific research into the earliest stages of life.

I’m experiencing the oddest sensation. I’m feeling proud to be British. Normally, I’ll be honest, it’s a struggle. Mainly because we keep doing things like taxing Google at 3%, or punishing people for having spare bedrooms and not punishing other people for having sex with people who don’t want to have sex with them, or continuing to let hipsters roam free. But: REJOICE! For we have just become something good. We have just become the first country to say to its scientists, “Go forth and research the sh*t out of human embryos, and we will pay for it – good luck!”

The research, led by Kathy Niakan at the Francis Crick Institute, allows for 14 days’ study of donated embryos left over from IVF research. Niakan and her team will be studying the very earliest stages of life in order to increase understanding (and prevention of) miscarriage and to improve IVF techniques.

It makes me proud because it’s a brave move at a time when the mood in many countries – particularly America, before whose might and cultural fashions we usually cringe – is to treat all such matters as sacrosanct. And why? Because anti-choice campaigners have succeeded – in the public mind and increasingly in legal fact – in privileging anything to do with wombs, reproduction or foetuses over anything else. Including and especially the rights of the women inescapably involved with them.

“Science rocks. And so does being British…” Lucy Mangan is happy with advances in human embryo research