The Human Tissues and Embryos Bill gets its first reading in the Lords today. That's the one that is going to provide an opportunity to revise the abortion law. Given the number of things in the Bill that will have peers at each other's throats, in the contained sort of way they do things there, it is gratifying to reflect that it is likely to include one measure about which there will be universal agreement. And that is a proposed ban on the sex selection of embryos for non-medical reasons. In other words, people undergoing IVF who want to weed out female embryos on the ground that they'd prefer a boy will get short shrift.

Of course, that's really good. If you're allowed to pick and choose the sex of your offspring, the awful likelihood is that you'll end up with a disproportionate number of boys. Not as bad as in China perhaps, where the one-child policy has meant a massive dearth of girls, resulting in ad hoc polyandry in some villages, but still unhealthy.

But this consensus that discrimination against female embryos would be a bad thing also serves to highlight that our attitude to the protection of embryos in general is remarkably free and easy. The gist of the Bill overall is to establish some sort of regulatory mechanism to supervise the creation and use of human embryos for research and reproductive purposes. Scientists can now create them for research up to a 14-day limit. They are used in experimental stem-cell therapies, one of the most exciting weapons against against degenerative diseases. But that research doesn't have to be on embryonic stem cells. Adult stem cells can produce equally good results.

So, our concern for female embryos is very selective indeed. So long as they're not being discarded on the grounds of gender, it seems it's fine to use them for any other purpose - unless it's for the creation of a clone, which is another arbitrary no-no.

The same principle is true of abortion, which will be discussed under cover of this Bill. Pro-choice campaigners argue for a woman's right to decide whether to continue with a pregnancy or not. Yet if the reason for her not wanting the baby is that it happens to be a girl - as happens routinely in India - those same individuals will get on their moral high horse.

But why is it OK to do away with a female foetus because it would be inconvenient to continue with the pregnancy, but really, really wrong to have it aborted on the grounds of gender? I mean, the reason most of us would disapprove of Herod's rough-and-ready approach to the Innocents is not that he wilfully adopted a policy of (anti-male) gender prejudice but that he did away with infants.

It's not that our morality is misguided in finding the sex selection of embryos and foetuses repugnant: it's just remarkably limited.

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