1. Texas serves subpoenas at Planned Parenthood clinics
2. Activists predict abortion will be a hot issue in 2016 presidential campaigns

For years, there has been an uneasy truce. Recognizing there’s little chance Roe v. Wade will be overturned any time soon, neither side in the abortion debate gave any ground, but there was a working, tacit agreement on all sides that for the most part, abortion should be “safe, legal and rare.” Those were the words used by President Bill Clinton in 1996 and repeated by President Barack Obama in 2010.

What the firestorm over those Planned Parenthood videos in the past few days shows is that we’ve lost even that middle ground. Supporters of abortion rights have set aside “safe” and “rare,” with the demand that the procedure be legal at all stages of pregnancy.

Planned Parenthood’s supporters claim the videos are edited (although unedited versions are available online), but no matter — they “stand with Planned Parenthood” no matter how gruesome the discoveries and revelations.

Let’s take “safe.” As the Kermit Gosnell trial in 2013 illustrates, abortion rights supporters are willing to overlook dangers to women and even babies born alive after botched abortions, if they complicate the argument to keep abortion legal.

If Gosnell’s crimes were isolated, the willing blindness to his practices was widespread.

“Gosnell had thousands of enablers: every judge and justice who has declared every abortion sacrosanct, every politician who has blocked meaningful regulation and oversight of the practice, and every intellectual who has furthered the notion that what resides in a woman’s womb is nothing more than a meaningless clump of cells,” National Review noted in an editorial.

That’s happening today. There’s clear video evidence of Planned Parenthood staff haggling over prices of body parts from aborted fetuses. But it’s being dismissed as propaganda from extremists, even as abortion supporters recognize the “tone” is hurting their cause.

“The videos do cleverly evoke visceral feelings of disgust — graphic images, physicians using the words ‘crush’ and ‘crunchy’ — to activate the stereotype that abortion providers are money-grubbing baby killers,” columnist Katha Pollitt wrote for the New York Times.

But those are self-inflicted wounds for supporters of abortion rights. Those images are effective because they’re real. Those words are repulsive because they were uncoached.

How about “rare” — the pro-abortion rights side’s only acknowledgement that perhaps, a medical procedure that ends a life (or even in their words, a potential life) is a bad thing, and shouldn’t be common?

That, too, is being jettisoned as a threat to the absolutism of the pro-abortion rights position.

Writing for The Huffington Post in 2014, Fran Moreland Jones says “But get rid of the ‘rare word… None of this — ‘good abortions,’ ‘bad abortions,’ whether or when there should be abortions — is anybody’s business but the woman involved. Only she and her physician can know the circumstances, and the circumstances of no two women are the same. So if the ‘rare’ word is clouding the issue, let’s dump the rare word.”

The real point here is that a tacit truce has been undermined. Americans who opposed abortion didn’t like that the U.S. Supreme Court legalized it nationwide; abortion rights supporters didn’t like that the Court left room for states to set some limits to it.

But the “safe, legal and rare” framework kept things civil for the most part. That framework is gone, now, because abortion rights supporters have taken the most extreme of positions: no regulations and no limits.