Thrown Back's Fr. Rob Johansen writes today of "The Children of Roe", concerning the culture of abortion that Roe has created.

Before I entered the seminary, I spent a couple of years teaching Latin...in public schools in suburban Maryland. In my last year teaching (knowing that I was going to seminary the following fall and perhaps, thereby, feeling emboldened), I announced to my classes that I would be absent the following Monday because I was participating in the March for Life (I took one of my "personal" days to do this). The reaction of my students was instructive.

Several of my students were outspokenly supportive and expressed their own pro-life convictions. A majority of them, however, were not. What was most striking were the reactions of a number of the girls in the class. They regarded abortion quite simply as their "right" - that was their only frame of reference.

He makes a sobering point that

Regardless of what becomes of abortion legally, the work of informing and changing the hearts the Children of Roe has barely begun.

Something that many leaders standing on that stage today would do well to really think about and accept.

It isn't a little ironic I should read this today. I also "announced" to my "day-job" world just today, kind of the same thing. Before settling down to live-blog the day's events, I recorded an outbound voicemail message for any callers to my company phone number, saying that

we are closed for the day so that our people can participate in various ways in the March For Life events around the nation in the hope that we can someday see that women have better alternatives than abortion.

I never have left such an outbound message on my work phones before. I am not quite sure what possessed me to do it today. I just had this really strong something telling me to do so.

Wouldn't you know? A potential client who had, three months ago, rejected my terms to do work for them, and who told me just before Christmas they might be reconsidering, called today, of all days, to say they were really revisiting my contract and wanted to discuss the couple of points they wanted to negotiate. And the first thing the VP said in his voicemail was

I have all the respect in the world for what you are doing today, good luck with it. I'll be in my office tomorrow, and hope to hear back from you then.

He was genuinely respectful.

It gets better. Very shortly after that, my call forwarding to my home office lit up with three more phone calls, none of which left a voicemail.

It occurred to me: what if that VP, amazed by our outbound message, called a few other folks telling them, "You've got to call this phone number and check out the message they leave for callers today."

I choose to think that if that was so, it was because they were glad to hear it, not disgusted or appalled.