Now that we know Planned Parenthood has a bustling trade in fetal body parts, you wonder how much longer the progressive/liberal wing of our body politic can pull the wool over America’s eyes that abortion kills little human beings. Everybody has to know that now, right? But the left’s response to a Planned Parenthood executive caught on video discussing little fetus body parts is indicative of a moral blindness that is breathtaking to behold. One example of what passes for progressive moral insight is a piece at the reliably liberal Slate by Amanda Marcotte.

To Ms. Marcotte, the issue is simply legal. The video doesn’t prove the organization is selling fetal body parts, which, amazingly enough, is against the law! Fetal body parts, she asserts, are just like any other body parts involved in a medical procedure. The facile reasoning in these two paragraphs is staggering:

As someone who is squeamish, it was extremely difficult for me to listen to Nucatola talk about extracting liver, heart, and other parts to be donated to medical research. (I nearly fainted when a friend showed me the video of her knee operation once.) But people who work in medicine for a living do, in fact, become inured to the gore in a way that can seem strange to those of us who aren’t regularly exposed to it. She also thought she was speaking to people in her profession who would be similarly accustomed to this sort of thing.

Abortion is gross, no doubt about it. It becomes grosser the later in a pregnancy it gets. But so is heart surgery. So is child-birth, for that matter. We don’t deny people who need help in those cases because the help is gross. Nor should we deny people that help when it comes to needing abortion. We also shouldn’t deny women who want to donate fetal or embryonic remains to science any more than we would deny someone who wants to be an organ donor, even though the latter is also quite gross to ponder.

I see. Grossness is the issue, not that a human being’s life was taken before it was allowed to be born, and it’s body parts sold. Make no mistake about it, an aborted fetus is dismembered in the womb, their body parts ripped limb from limb, more carefully when certain parts are ostensibly to be used for the greater good. There is something disturbingly Joseph Mengele about all this.