For many, there’s also a hope that these videos will change public opinion.

Abortion opponents see one of the same qualities that they seized on in the case of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, the Philadelphia abortion provider who, in the words of a grand jury, “illegally delivered live, viable babies in the third trimester of pregnancy, and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors." In that controversy, abortion-rights supporters correctly noted that Dr. Gosnell’s clinic was atypical; that he was accused of perpetrating murders, not legal abortions; and that if abortion were illegal, there might be more clinics like his, not fewer. But the case exposed the public to descriptions of “fetal demise”—more graphic than any that are typically encountered. And some observers noticed that late-term abortions performed legally at the clinic seemed no less brutal than illegal infanticides, even if tiny arms and legs were dismembered and spinal chords severed inside the womb or birth canal rather than outside it.

“I think we’ve forgotten what abortion really is,” activist Lila Rose told Bill O’Reilly at the time. Abortion opponents who believe it to be murder hoped that the case would jolt some of their fellow Americans toward the same conclusion–– and they see similar potential in the Planned Parenthood videos, even granting the significant differences between the two controversies. So long as the organization’s supporters and opponents are arguing over whether it behaved legally or illegally when providing the livers of aborted fetuses to medical researchers, some number of persuadable people who haven’t thought deeply about the subject will realize that doctors are sometimes killing something with a liver, and perhaps start to think of the unborn as possessing livers rather than just clumps of cells.

If that triggers a visceral reaction against abortion, Ross Douthat argues, it would be justified. “Real knowledge isn’t purely theoretical; it’s the fruit of experience, recognition, imagination, life itself,” he writes. “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.”

For their part, abortion-rights activists also draw on visceral reactions in forming and arguing for their moral judgments. In their view, prohibiting abortion would be gruesome: a guarantor of horrific outcomes for women that would play out in millions of horrific scenes. They urge the public to think of the coat-hanger; the filthy underground clinics where desperate teenage girls will be abused; the 15-year-old rape victim whose skin will crawl at the physical sensation of her rapist’s baby growing inside her; the mother of three who dies painfully in pregnancy because she could not persuade anyone to terminate the pregnancy that threatened her health.