Amid calls to investigate and defund Planned Parenthood, Jeff Jacoby at the Boston Globe hits the nail on the head. It’s not the legality or illegality of trafficking in fetal remains that stands out most prominently from the release of those two videos of top PP personnel chatting at lunch about their trade. It’s the “ghoulish banality,” the insouciance, the total absence of sensitivity that is revealed:

As a matter of law, Planned Parenthood may be on solid ground. But it isn’t illegality that makes this video so scandalous. It is amorality. It is the nonchalance with which Planned Parenthood’s senior medical director schmoozes, between swigs of wine and forkfuls of salad, about dismembering a healthy unborn child and selling its parts for “anywhere from $30 to $100” apiece. It is the sheer indifference to the enormity of destroying life in the womb and then “donating” the wreckage for money.

Some of the phrases used by the women in these undercover videos sear themselves in your memory: the part about employing “less crunchy” methods to ensure preserving desired organs, “whole specimens,” “I’d say a lot of people want liver,” “I want a Lamborghini.”

You haven’t seen the videos yet? Click on the image above or below if you care to:

Some serious people on the pro-life side have criticized the ethics of the activists involved in obtaining the videos. World Magazine cites Robert George of Princeton, and I go along with him on this:

[Center for Medical Progress]’s three-year sting operation and the subsequent video has faced criticism from some pro-life advocates, including Robert George, a prominent conservative Catholic and religious liberty advocate, who questioned CMP’s work in a post on his Facebook page.

“Telling lies to gain access to Planned Parenthood personnel is not on a par of evil with the grisly and quite literally homicidal practices of that corrupt organization,” he wrote. “And yet, telling lies is wrong and cannot be justified even for the sake of exposing those practices. When I have made this point in the past in relation to sting operations carried out by Live Action, I have drawn the ire of some of my most beloved pro-life friends.”

These good questions aside — legal, ethical, moral — what’s undoubtedly true is that the videos highlight the insensitivity that goes along logically with a certain view of life and its origins. I say “logically” because plenty of materialists and atheists are commendably sensitive people. But nothing in materialism demands this. On the contrary, if human beings are just the product of blind, unbidden forces, cosmic flotsam, then making use of our remains when we die or when we are killed, and asking compensation for the trouble that medical professionals go to in obtaining vital, intact body parts, hardly seems objectionable.

If a lot of people want liver and you can deliver it to them, taking care to avoid the crunchier methods in doing so, don’t you deserve your Lamborghini?

However, if science suggests that human beings are designed, bearing the image — that is, reflecting the ultimate purpose — of their designer, then obviously the matter is very different. Yes, there have always been people who believe or say they believe in a purpose behind the universe who nevertheless act in ways that defile and disregard the sanctity of life in their fellow humans.

But logically, recognizing that life arises from a source of intelligence demands that we respect life: talk, think, feel about it in a spirit of awe. Feel dread at the prospect of treating it lightly. On the other hand, if science confirms a materialist view, there’s nothing to be shocked at in these videos.