Rational Disgust

Ross Douthat comments on why so many of his fellow journalists are turning away from the outrageous organ trade of Planned Parenthood: “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. . . .

“dwelling on that content gets you uncomfortably close to Selzer’s tipping point — that moment when you start pondering the possibility that an institution at the heart of respectable liberal society is dedicated to a practice that deserves to be called barbarism.

“That’s a hard thing to accept. It’s part of why so many people hover in the conflicted borderlands of the pro-choice side. They don’t like abortion, they think its critics have a point . . . but to actively join our side would require passing too comprehensive a judgment on their coalition, their country, their friends, their very selves.”

Better to turn a blind eye than to admit the truth.