For two weeks now, an anti-abortion advocacy group has been disclosing footage of Planned Parenthood officials breezily discussing the medical and bureaucratic processes by which they provide aborted fetal tissue to biomedical researchers.

The group, the Center for Medical Progress, has made an effort to publicize selectively edited versions of the videos, rather than the unedited footage, which they’ve also released, in order to create the impression that Planned Parenthood is illegally securing and selling fetal organs for profit. In full context it appears Planned Parenthood is doing no such thing.

But the availability of the unedited footage hasn’t put the controversy to rest, in large part because the secretly taped officials seem so insouciant about wrenching issues.

Conservatives have joined the fight with relish, under the not-insane assumption that Planned Parenthood’s allies would lose the ensuing public opinion battle, creating an opportunity for the right to advance pro-life causes, or (more feasibly) to punish Democrats. What they’ve done instead, using ghoulish propaganda, is convince myriad religious conservatives that Planned Parenthood is making a business of harvesting baby flesh, and that something must be done to stop them. Against the backdrop of the presidential primary, this is turning a public relations nightmare for Democrats into an intractably escalating political crisis for Republicans.

I intend to ask each POTUS candidate next week if they’d support a gov’t shutdown if that’s what it took to defund Planned Parenthood. — Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) July 31, 2015

The emotional power of the Planned Parenthood videos lies in the images they evoke, but their political power stems from broad, intense conservative opposition to abortion generally—not to fetal tissue research per se. If these conservatives were foremost concerned with the ethics of fetal tissue donation, they could propose banning it outright, or at least tissue obtained from legal abortions. Instead, they are proposing to eliminate Planned Parenthood’s federal funding. This non sequitur gives away the plot, and all of the cross-ideological sympathy they might have had at the outset.