The U.S. Senate failed to pass a bill that would require health care professionals to provide life-saving medical care to babies born alive after a failed abortion.

It’s difficult to write such a sentence without recoiling.

Yet, all but three Senate Democrats – Bob Casey Jr., Joe Manchin and Doug Jones – voted against the bill.

The Senate voted down the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act by a count of 53-44.

All of the Democrats running for president in 2020 voted against it: Bernie Sanders (Vt.), Kamala Harris, Cory “I am Spartacus” Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren.

You have to give Casey, Manchin and Jones credit I suppose, though I’m not sure how we got to the point in this country where not supporting infanticide makes you an outlier.

It occurs to me that Democrats often chide Republicans and the National Rifle Association for viewing every attempt at firearms regulation, no matter how sensible or tangential, as a slippery slope toward full-blown repeal of the Second Amendment. It seems the ultimate irony that these same Democrats, who support gun control as a way to save lives, have no problem casting a vote for infanticide.

No Democrats acknowledged the anomaly. Instead, this was all about women’s health, they said, one after another.

“This bill is just another line of attack in the ongoing war on women’s health,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen said before the vote.

Neither Shaheen nor anyone else could adequately explain exactly how this bill is a “war on women’s health.” Probably because it isn’t.

“That is the actual intent of this bill, reducing access to safe abortion care would threaten the health of women in Hawaii,” Mazie Hirono said on the Senate floor.

This bill isn’t about health care for women. It isn’t even about abortion because the legislation wouldn’t have affected access to abortion in any way. But the rejection of the bill is about appealing to a far-left constituency that is growing increasingly radical and influential, which is why the Democrats’ remarks before the vote really had nothing to do with the legislation itself.

“What this bill does is address the health care of a baby that is born alive after a botched abortion. We’re not talking about abortion, folks. We’re talking about the life of a child that is born,” Republican Sen. Joni Ernst said.

Beyond the politics, it makes perfect sense that if you have no moral compunction about killing a child before birth, allowing her to die immediately after birth isn’t much of a distinction. This sort of thinking is consistent and logical, if you believe that life itself is basically accidental, devoid of eternal significance and, ultimately, meaningless.

I’m not going to debate the meaning of life here but I do have to wonder what the Democrats are thinking and question whether they are so steeped in ideology and groupthink that they are incapable of seeing any issue through an objective lens.

“This is about the most simple thing you can say, which is that a baby is a baby, and they have dignity and worth,” Republican Ben Sasse, the bill’s sponsor, said., “And it’s not because they’re powerful. It’s because they’re babies.”

This is, of course, is what the bill is about and the Democrats know it. The argument that the legislation is somehow an infringement on “reproductive rights” – a euphemism coined by the left to make abortion sound less awful – is mendacious, even within the context of today’s political drama, and that’s saying something.

The failure of this bill is an abomination and it has further exposed the modern Democratic party as one that views infants as collateral damage in its pursuit to fundamentally transform the country.

The fact that only three Democratic senators voted in favor of the bill is unconscionable, though not surprising if you’ve been paying attention.

The Democratic National Committee’s new platform calls for, among other things, the repeal of the Hyde Amendment, which bars the use of federal (taxpayer) funds to pay for abortions.

So, to recap, according to the political left, not only should abortion be available on-demand, we should all have to pay for it. And in the event of a botched abortion, we don’t want any physician sticking her nose in and saving the baby’s life.

If we didn’t know where the Democrats stood before, we do now.

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Copyright 2019 Rich Manieri, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Rich Manieri is a Philadelphia-born journalist and author. He is currently a professor of journalism at Asbury University in Kentucky. His book, “We Burn on Friday: A Memoir of My Father and Me” is available at amazon.com. You can reach him at [email protected].