Gee, I wonder why? Taylor Millard noted yesterday that Texas officials may have some of the unpublished videos from Center for Medical Progress. That got confirmed earlier this morning:

Texas: RT @Johnseago .@KenPaxtonTX confirms that the AGs office have received undercover videos of an abortion clinic in Texas. #txlege

— LifeNews.com (@LifeNewsHQ) July 29, 2015

The Texas state Senate’s Health and Human Services Committee plan to review the videos to determine whether Planned Parenthood broke any laws, and to debate how to put an end to cash trades for organs harvested during abortions. That will take place this afternoon, and AG Ken Paxton will testify to the activities of the Texas Planned Parenthood clinic:

But the release of the videos prompted calls for investigations from Texas’ Republican leadership, which led to a probe by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is expected to provide testimony during the hearing.

In announcing the hearing earlier this month, Republican committee chairman Charles Schwertner of Georgetown said the committee would focus on determining whether Planned Parenthood affiliates in Texas were selling fetal tissue and what steps could be “taken to put a swift and decisive stop to it.”

“I know many Texans are equally horrified by such a callous disregard for innocent human life,” Schwertner said in a previous statement.

Planned Parenthood health centers in Texas do not currently donate tissue for medical research, according to the organization.

Well, so they say, but they won’t make that claim under oath today. Instead, Planned Parenthood will refuse to appear at all, calling the hearing an attempt at “political gamesmanship”:

Planned Parenthood officials are not testifying before Texas lawmakers about covertly recorded videos that target the abortion provider, calling the emergency hearing “political gamesmanship.” …

Planned Parenthood says it has done nothing illegal or improper.

Perhaps, but why won’t they make that claim in the hearing? The existence of the CMP video of a clinic in Texas and the AG’s interest in it would at least tend to imply that there are legal issues that arise from it. Why wouldn’t Planned Parenthood want a representative there to push back, if those allegations are unfounded? It looks like an attempt to keep from having responses committed to the record, and avoid potential charges if they get proven to be false.

The vise is tightening, but the debate focuses too narrowly on the legality of tissue transfers for compensation. Planned Parenthood wants that debate, because they can then argue that this benefits humanity through research — even though that ignores the fact that they could just donate the organs, rather than maximize their revenue stream by charging on the “per-item thing,” as yesterday’s video showed a Planned Parenthood official explaining.

No, the real problem for Planned Parenthood is that this organ trade has exposed the core lie at the heart of the abortion industry. In my column today for The Week, I advise people to remain focused on that fundamental hypocrisy demonstrated in these videos:

Planned Parenthood wants to keep the debate on these points to deflect from the real debate — the nature of abortion itself, and the deliberate minimization in language that has allowed it. Abortion defenders claim that the procedure does not terminate life, and that it has no more moral meaning than excising a tumor or a cyst, a “clump of cells” in the most common construction. On Twitter, a young actor in Hollywood offered a more crude assessment this week. “A pile of goop should not have more rights than a human being,” Lucas Neff tweeted, “period.”

Now, though, we see that the same abortion clinics that argue for the “pile of goop” status see things very, very differently when it comes time to benefit from the results of their services. They adjust their techniques to extract and market human organs for buyers to meet demand, with the clear value attached on the basis of both their humanity and specificity. Clinic executives like Dr. Ginde want to negotiate those markets on a per-item basis because of the value that humanity and specificity provides to both parties, “just because we can see how much we can get out of it.”

The true danger to Planned Parenthood and the entire industry is the exposure of their hypocrisy. The two positions of “clumps of cells” and negotiating over human organs from abortions are mutually exclusive. One cannot extract human organs from “a pile of goop,” or from tumors or undifferentiated “clumps of cells.” Human organs come from human beings, and the only way to harvest them from unborn human beings is to kill them first. The videos cut through all of the misdirection, all of the antiseptic generalities used in defense of abortion, to expose its true nature — and that’s what has Planned Parenthood panicked over the videos.

That may also be the argument that Planned Parenthood wants to avoid by bailing out of the hearing in Texas, too. We have them on the run, and we should make sure that they keep running.