Note: Andrew McCarthy will be my guest on today’s Ed Morrissey Show at 3 pm ET!

During the Saddleback Church forum last weekend, Barack Obama made a point to scold America for its failure to follow the precepts of Matthew in “that whatever you do for the least of my brothers, you do for me.”  Andrew McCarthy takes that premise and applies it to Obama’s infamous position on Illinois legislation designed to prevent the deliberate infanticide occuring in hospitals in which live infants were left to die after surviving the abortion process.  Wouldn’t these children qualify as “the least of my brothers”, almost literally?

They were coming out alive. Born alive. Babies. Vulnerable human beings Obama, in his detached pomposity, might otherwise include among “the least of my brothers.” But of course, an abortion extremist can’t very well be invoking Saint Matthew, can he? So, for Obama, the shunning of these least of our brothers and sisters — millions of them — is somehow not among America’s greatest moral failings. …

Infanticide is a bracing word. But in this context, it’s the only word that fits. Obama heard the testimony of a nurse, Jill Stanek. She recounted how she’d spent 45 minutes holding a living baby left to die.

The child had lacked the good grace to expire as planned in an induced-labor abortion — one in which an abortionist artificially induces labor with the expectation that the underdeveloped “fetus, or child — however you want to describe it” will not survive the delivery.

Stanek encountered another nurse carrying the child to a “soiled utility room” where it would be left to die. It wasn’t that unusual. The induced-labor method was used for late-term abortions. Many of the babies were strong enough to survive the delivery. At least for a time.

McCarthy picks up the same text as I noted yesterday in my post on this subject from Obama’s debate in April 2002.  Instead of setting himself up as the defender of the “least among us”, Obama worries about the liabilities of the doctors who suddenly find themselves with two live patients instead of one.  Obama’s biggest concern was that a second doctor would have to make a determination of the status of the infant, fully out of the birth canal and alive despite the attempts to abort the child.

It’s too burdensome, Obama argues, to have a second doctor check on the infant.  But why was this “burden” of a second examination added?  Because the doctors who aborted the children were the ones ordering the staff to discard them after they were born alive.  Stanek made that extremely and explicitly clear in her testimony, which Obama attended.  He acts as if she had never spoken, and that the subsequent investigation hadn’t shown evidence that Christ Hospital wasn’t alone in this practice.

McCarthy points out the scope of the problem:

As Obama spoke these words, he well knew that children were being born alive but precisely not looked after by the abortion doctors whose water the senator was carrying. As Stanek put it, as many as one in five — twenty percent — were left to die. That was what prompted the legislation in the first place.

Obama wanted to protect the abortion industry from acknowledging this disgusting practice, and so he just pretended in his speech that the issue was purely academic.  He refused to stop infanticide in order to shield the multi-billion-dollar abortion lobby.  How does that square with Matthew’s call, Senator Obama?

Or maybe that’s above his pay grade, too.