The videos in question, of course, were the first five installments of an expose of Planned Parenthood from the Center for Medical Progress. The short versions were released simultaneously with the full-length versions and transcripts.

The editorial itself is nominally better than its headline, but no less desperate to change the subject. Somehow, the Star Tribune Editorial Board thinks that seeing large plates filled with dismembered babies is a distraction from the abortion debate — which, by implication, the Star Tribune and Planned Parenthood are eager to engage, despite the fact that PP and associates are fighting tooth and nail to block access to the remaining videos.

Here's the thing: These difficult-to-endure scenes are precisely what the abortion debate is about. This is what babies look like after they have been torn apart by vacuum, curette and forceps while still kicking in their mother's wombs. This is how the smallest, most vulnerable among us are made dead.

What the videos graphically remind us is that abortion is not an abstraction; it involves real flesh-and-blood mothers and their babies — babies with arms and legs and eyes that stare back, with hearts and lungs and livers that can be used in human research because they are the hearts and lungs and livers of human beings. Yet the lab technicians casually poke about among these "fetal remains" in the same breezy manner that Deb Nucatola, in the first video, pokes around her salad.

Perhaps these bits of baby are, to use the Star Tribune's phrase, "being used respectfully." But they are not being obtained respectfully.

However, exposing the barbarism that is abortion is not the main reason for the videos. If it were, nobody would be in statehouses and the nation's capitol seeking to defund Planned Parenthood. They would be seeking to end abortion.

The main focus of the videos, and the main focus of the campaign to defund PP, is the fundamental dishonesty of this swallower of half a billion dollars a year in federal funds and millions more in state largesse. There is evidence in the videos that several federal laws are being broken. But even if courts disagree with that assessment, here are some things we see in the videos that no claims of "dubious editing" can erase.

Middleman companies like StemExpress sell their services of procuring fetal tissue as financially profitable for the abortionist. Local nonprofit affiliates of the national PP organization often use this method to break even, or even better than even. One director of research brags about her "contributions to the bottom line," both locally and nationally. Those in charge of procurement of body parts discuss creative bookkeeping methods so they will not "get caught": under research, rather than business, even when they themselves do no research. The national organization fears legal repercussions, and so leaves local affiliates to work out deals with labs. Abortionists talk cavalierly about violating their protocols, and the signed agreement they have with the patient not to change their procedures, so as to better obtain specific tissue samples, including "intact fetal cadavers." When doing so, the abortionist does not attempt to avoid pain for the woman; rather, what dictates how well they can obtain these samples is how much pain the woman can bear.

The sixth video, just released, gives the testimony of one StemExpress procurement technician that, where she obtained specimens, the company did not always try to obtain consent.

All over these videos, we see Planned Parenthood's motto: "Care, no matter what." Our own eyes and ears tell us that this motto should read: "Care … about the bottom line, not you." And the silly accounting flim-flam that says abortion makes up only 3 percent of services at Planned Parenthood is exposed by the fact that it makes up 40 percent of revenue. That figure rises considerably from "compensation" for fetal parts.

There may not be much data showing that others can do the job of women's reproductive health that Planned Parenthood does. But there is none that shows they can't, and mounting evidence that PP can't be trusted with the taxpayers' money or women's lives.

Stephen J. Heaney is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of St. Thomas.