Apparently the state of California is charging the folks who taped Planned Parenthood officials talking about trading the body parts of dismembered babies for cash with a slew of felonies:

BREAKING: Anti-abortion activists who made undercover videos of Planned Parenthood talks charged with 15 felonies in California. — The Associated Press (@AP) March 29, 2017

I'm not a legal scholar so I'll leave the merits of this case to others; perhaps someone could dive into the fact that the Democrat pursuing the case took money from Planned Parenthood when he was a member of Congress.* I'm more amused by the people who insist on reiterating the nonsense talking point that trading the body parts of dismembered babies for cash shouldn't be considered "selling" those body parts. Consider, for instance, this appallingly credulous subheadline:

Even The Liberal Vox Dot Com™ was a bit squicked out by the discussion of the trading of body parts from dismembered babies for cash portrayed in the videos:

But there are also moments that should give supporters of the women's health provider pause—moments when officials with the group seem to haggle over fetal tissue compensation and appear to make women's health a secondary priority. These are moments that do not appear any less troublesome when watched in the full video. They are not simply a product of biased editing—and, if anything, the biased editing is making them too easy for Planned Parenthood's supporters to ignore.

To be clear and to refresh your memory, the videos showed Planned Parenthood employees discussing the ways to acquire more cash for dismembered baby body parts—the less dismembering, the more cash is the long and the short of it. And the fees weren't exactly constant; here's Vox again:

Gatter does make a point of saying her clinic is "not in it for the money." She's clearly being baited by the "buyer" into a negotiation. Still, this haggling over price shouldn't happen if the clinic simply intends to receive reimbursement for costs associated with procuring tissue.

The argument, of course, is that Planned Parenthood wasn't "selling" the body parts of dismembered babies; they were, rather, merely being reimbursed for costs related to sending said body parts from said dismembered babies to practitioners of Science.**

I call this the Free (You Just Pay Shipping and Handling!) Defense. It has a special appeal to dullards.

If you've ever seen something being sold on TV via a 1-800 number, you're typically treated to an additional enticement, something along the lines of: "Buy this pan and if you call in the next 20 minutes you'll get ANOTHER PAN FREE (you just pay shipping and handling)!"

The people who watched those videos, saw the negotiations, and still believe that Planned Parenthood was simply being reimbursed for the cost of transporting the body parts of dismembered babies strike me as the sort of dumb-dumbs who hear those offers and lurch off the couch for a phone, their fat fingers mashing the keypad in excitement because, by God, they only have 20 minutes and this extra pan is totally free and its cost to the company is in no way built into the cost of the other pan or into the additional S&H charge they're slapping on to your order for the "free" pan. The makers of that pan aren't even SELLING it, you guys—they're just GIVING IT AWAY.

So, yeah. Free baby body parts, y'all. They're not for sale even a little bit. You just pay shipping and handling.

*cc @freebeacon staff

**And we should not question how The Science works or how The Science acquires its materials; that's something that only people of low birth and mean disposition would do.