Think what you like about Ross Douthat, but publishing this at the New York Times is a genuine truth-to-power moment on his part. Somebody’s going to try to get him fired for writing this. It’s exactly the sort of thing that NYT readers generally want to avoid thinking about:

…real knowledge isn’t purely theoretical; it’s the fruit of experience, recognition, imagination, life itself.

And the problem these videos create for Planned Parenthood isn’t just a generalized queasiness at surgery and blood.

It’s a very specific disgust, informed by reason and experience — the reasoning that notes that it’s precisely a fetus’s humanity that makes its organs valuable, and the experience of recognizing one’s own children, on the ultrasound monitor and after, as something more than just “products of conception” or tissue for the knife.

Put another way: Planned Parenthood can lie about ‘deceptive editing’ until the cows come home. But it wasn’t deceptive editing that put those necromancer’s masks just under the surface of Deborah Nucatola and Mary Gatter’s faces.  It was spending decades breathing in the noxious spiritual fumes of the abortion industry. And that’s not something that can be discounted so easily.

I wonder what we’ll see next week. I also dread what we’ll see. Because – just like the NYT’s readership – I didn’t really want to think about this stuff, either.  But I guess that that option is now closed.

Moe Lane (crosspost)