Above my pay grade...

In a recent forum at Saddleback Church Sen. Barack Obama said, among other things, that the question of when life begins is "Above my pay grade..." I'm not sure why he said that, I presume that he may have been trying to be coy in front of an audience that consisted largely of more or less conservative evangelical Christians or perhaps he wanted to use ambiguity to move towards the center and away from what has been a consistently pro abortion voting record. I can only speculate but it begs some questions.

-Making profound, even life and death, decisions is part of being President. If a question like this is "above your pay grade" are you indicating your personal level of readiness for the job?

-If a question about when life begins is "above your pay grade" then why should it be left to people who presumably are less qualified to answer it then you?

-If you have doubts about when life begins shouldn't you do everything you can to protect life in all its phases for the sake of the benefit of the doubt?

That I can rattle off these questions in less then a minute says something.