The latest battle in the war against Planned Parenthood continues. On Tuesday, the anti-choice group with the Orwellian moniker “Center for Medical Progress” released a third video purporting to reveal bad things about its target. As with the previous two videos, it doesn’t. But while the videos themselves are of little interest, the way opponents of reproductive freedom have used them as propaganda is.

The latest video shows a lab technician sorting through fetal tissue that was collected after an abortion. As with the two previous videos, what this shows us is that… abortions produce fetal tissue. The videos do not show Planned Parenthood doing anything illegal or unethical. They do not show Planned Parenthood engaging in illegal practices. Nonetheless, the enthusiastic promotion of the videos by opponents of reproductive freedom suggests they believe that they have a smoking gun.

They’re almost certainly wrong about this. Anti-choicers have used graphic imagery from abortions as a tool for decades, but it hasn’t worked: Roe v Wade remains stubbornly popular. Still, it’s worth examining some of the different ways opponents of legal abortion have attempted to use these not-actually-damning videos.

For the maximalist approach, see Ross Douthat’s most recent New York Times column. Douthat acknowledges the most obvious objection to using these videos to advocate restricting abortion: the fact that a medical procedure sounds gross when described is a lousy reason to ban it, since this ban would encompass most medical procedures. Nonetheless, Douthat has thoughts about people who don’t draw the same moral conclusions from the videos that he does:

This reluctance [to join the anti-choice side] is a human universal. It’s why white Southerners long preferred Lost Cause mythology to slaveholding realities. It’s why patriotic Americans rarely want to dwell too long on My Lai or Manzanar or Nagasaki. It’s why, like many conservatives, I was loath to engage with the reality of torture in Bush-era interrogation programs.

If you’re keeping score at home, advocates for reproductive freedom are being compared to slaveholders, war criminals, users of nuclear weapons and torturers. Note as well the self-congratulatory flipside: people who want to coerce women to carry pregnancy to term as part of a larger agenda of maintaining the subordination of women have the self-awarded moral status of anti-slavery abolitionists. This kind of rhetoric has little chance of persuading anybody, and I’m not sure it’s even intended to.

More insidious and potentially effective is the use of the videos to advance more superficially modest state restrictions of reproductive freedom. A representative example can be found in Damon Linker’s column on the subject at The Week, where he calls for moderation and compromise. European abortion laws, according to Linker, properly balance a woman’s rights with the “rights of the baby [sic],” while in the United States, conversely, “[e]ver since Roe v. Wade declared abortion-on-demand a constitutional right, defenders of that right have treated it as absolute, inviolable, and applicable to the entire length of pregnancy, from conception on down to natural birth.”

There are numerous critical errors with Linker’s comparison. First of all, American abortion law has never been characterized by “absolutes,” and states have always maintained some leeway to regulate abortions. And even more importantly, state authority to regulate abortion is growing, not diminishing, in the US. Under Roe v Wade, states were permitted to regulate or ban (with an exemption for the life or health of the mother) post-viability abortions. And since 1992, Roe has been superseded by Planned Parenthood v Casey’s holding that weakened abortion protections by saying that pre-viability abortions could be regulated as long as these regulations do not constitute an “undue burden” on a woman’s right to obtain one. States have since been allowed to pass virtually any regulation that does not outright ban pre-viability abortions, and many have passed elaborate regulatory frameworks that make it enormously difficult to obtain safe abortions.

Even worse for Linker’s argument is that the Casey regime has been a disaster. Regulations like waiting periods, parental consent and restrictions on abortion clinics appeal to a vague sense among a lot of people that abortion shouldn’t be banned outright but that women should only obtain them for the “right” reasons. But even leaving aside how unattractive this paternalism is on its face, the fact is that state regulations of abortion don’t actually having anything to do with why women choose to have abortions. What they do is make it harder for poor women to get abortions than rich women, harder for women in rural areas to obtain abortions than women in major urban centers and harder for women in states like Mississippi and Texas to obtain abortions than women in New York and Washington state. And while self-styled moderates like Linker like to emphasize the problems of later-term abortions, these regulatory obstacle courses also make it harder for women to obtain first-trimester abortions.

The United States, in other words, has plenty of abortion “compromise.” The product of these compromises is a host of abortion regulations that are arbitrary, irrational and inequitable. One of the purposes of the Planned Parenthood videos is to support such regulations by advancing the idea that abortion is icky and compromise is civilized. But nothing in the videos dignify regulations that make it harder for more vulnerable women to obtain safe abortions while advancing no legitimate public purpose.