An ordinary human conscience should have difficulty even processing the fact that 44 Senate Democrats on Monday blocked a bill that would protect newborn infants from being killed or subjected to negligent homicide should they survive an attempted abortion.

Yes, as a side note, polling indicates Democrats might suffer politically from their callousness.

All but three Democrats in the Senate voted against the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, which would simply require that doctors “exercise the same degree of professional skill, care, and diligence to preserve the life and health of” children who survive attempted abortions as they would for any other infants after ordinary live births.

Much of the establishment media coverage obscures this fact, so let’s repeat it: This bill applies only to babies who are alive, breathing the air of day, separate and apart from the mother’s body, no longer in any sense “fetuses” but who are unambiguously, fully formed human beings. These are babies that doctors tried, but failed, to abort. They are there, presumably in the maternity room, struggling for life.

This bill says doctors cannot turn “ Gosnell” on them, snuffing the life from breathing babies, nor can they sit and watch while a baby who could survive with a modicum of assistance instead suffocates to death. That’s all. It’s the sort of thing that until about a decade ago would not have occurred to decent human beings to be the slightest bit controversial.

This isn’t about abortion. The bill would stop not a single abortion. This is about infanticide, or, to put it bluntly, murder. It protects children from being murdered. Yet, 44 Senate Democrats voted against it, claiming that it somehow would “threaten the health of women” (undeniably a flat-out lie) or somehow interfere with legitimate consultations “ between women and their trusted doctors.”

But how is there any legitimate discussion to be held? The options are three: Kill the breathing baby, let it lie there until it dies, or provide ordinary care so that it lives. This bill makes it a crime for the doctor to refuse to provide ordinary care. That’s it.

It isn’t a mere hypothetical. Virginia, New York, and Vermont this year have passed bills with language that quite arguably could allow such infanticide. Babies do sometimes survive attempted abortions, which is what happened numerous times before the monstrous Kermit Gosnell murdered them. Babies who survive abortion attempts can and do otherwise grow and live full lives.

With all the attention to infanticide and late-term abortions, at least some polling data is showing that Democrats may be sorry for opposing this bill. Marist, a pollster that has done surveys on abortion attitudes for more than a decade, announced this week a “ dramatic shift” in favor of being pro-life, against abortion, including among Democrats and young voters, in various measures of self-identification along the “life” vs. “choice” spectrum.

Marist’s new overall numbers bring pro-life and pro-choice sides into exact parity, which is roughly what other surveys have shown for some time. Because pollsters use different sampling methods, it would be interesting to see if the other pollsters that already showed a rough parity now will show a shift from parity to an actual pro-life majority.

Either way, Marist’s numbers should give Democrats pause. The recent, radical moves in favor of extra-late-term abortions and infanticide are clearly not playing well in the broader public.

Thirteen years ago, Democrats howled when National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru penned a thoughtful, full-length book calling them and the media together the “ Party of Death.” By their refusal to condemn infanticide — a stance, to put it bluntly, that is barbaric — Democrats risk proving conclusively that Ponnuru was right.