The gathering of evangelical thought-leaders featured a roundtable discussion on abortion. A young man stood up and shared his conviction that abortion is The Defining Moral Issue of Our Time. He compared it to slavery in how history will judge us for it and how our blindness makes us complicit in the act. A woman at a table across the room started berating him. How dare he compare abortion to slavery?

The woman was white. The man was black. Some of us in the room were in shock at her objections.

She was privileged. I didn’t know her full story, and I still don’t, because she shut down the conversation. But the man had shared his story openly and eloquently, and his reasons for fighting abortion were as personal as Frederick Douglass’s for fighting slavery.

His mother was alone, pregnant and scared. Against her family’s wishes and society’s prejudice, she carried him in her womb until she gave birth and gave him up for adoption. He was rescued by her bravery and enjoyed a good life with his new family. In his twenties he got his girlfriend pregnant. He wrestled with the thought of abortion and chose life, responsibility and parenthood instead.

Some people bristle when abortion is compared to slavery. Those of us who have read the lives of William Wilberforce and Hannah More think otherwise. We are committed to our cause as abolitionists.

Those who could have been aborted also think otherwise, and as their mothers and fathers chose life, they understand what the powerful-but-aging abortion lobby has chosen to ignore: the children being dismembered in and out of the womb are not mere “tissue” or “products of conception.” They are human.

They also understand something else: If your body can be exploited because you are powerless, someone with an entrenched profit motive — be it slavery or research — may deny your humanity.

When that happens — and history shows us that we need to be on constant guard against it — our job is to confront a complicit society with the reality of the humanity and the human dignity of the people it has destroyed.

We cannot look away. We cannot un-see. Seeing and getting others to see is the role of the artist as much as the journalist, of the stay-at-home dad as much as the pastor, of the student as much as the lawmaker.

This is why the British abolitionists led tours of the slave-ships in England, confronting the otherwise-cocooned bourgeoisie with the human price of their trade with the colonies. The smell of those festering ships and the sight of the chains they bore were shocking  and they were necessary.

The sight of a white police officer shooting an unarmed black man dead is also shocking. But this is the sight has caused many, myself included, to reassess our formerly easy dismissals of racism.

The sights presented by the undercover videos documenting the sale of baby body parts by Planned Parenthood are also shocking. They also have the power to convict the conscience and change the convictions of a nation that is again deeply committed to denying the full humanity of people who are fully human.

The mainstream media understands this all too well. While some outlets have no problem showing violent footage of shooting deaths, they have censored or refused to show the footage from the Center for Medical Progress videos.

In dismissing the videos out of hand as the work of “anti-choice extremists,” the mainstream media has failed to deal with the reports’ most devastating aspect: the sight of tiny arms, legs, and feet; of livers, hearts, and brains; of eyeballs.

The eyeballs were the last straw for me. Sensitive organs of light, windows to the soul, individual expressions as unique as fingerprints and DNA, and so similar to my own eyes beholding them in every way, except smaller, and for sale to the highest bidder.

It is hard to watch these videos. It is easy to look away. Easier still is to read about the videos from a mainstream, “neutral” news source, which may devote more than 3,000 words to an analysis and “explainer” of the video without once mentioning the specific sights of these body parts. To do so would mean confronting the humanity of the unconsenting donors.

Please, don’t look away. Remember the man who could have been killed and could have killed his child. Remember the people who didn’t look away from the evidence of the slave ships. They looked, and let themselves be moved, and worked until the slaves were freed. Don’t dismiss this as a right-wing attack on women’s rights. Understand what’s happening behind closed doors at your neighborhood abortion clinic.

Watch the videos.