By Dave Andrusko

Early and often, throughout the three-day NRLC convention held in Pittsburgh I heard some of the same words and descriptors: "amazing," "one of the best ever," "buzz," and "where is the convention next year?" [Hint: Jacksonville, Florida.

Maddy Curtis entertained National Teens for Life. Maddy was the first contestant to earn a Golden Ticket in last season's "American Idol."

What explains what was clearly one of the best-received conventions in recent memory? For starters, the location. Pennsylvania is pro-life country.

And then there was the quality of the general sessions at NRLC 2010, both in the sense of topics that people thirsted to learn more about and quality speakers who could deliver information in a way that the audience could quickly assimilate, profit from, and be able to share with folks back home.

To name just a few: Dr. Steve Zelinski and the Pain of the Unborn; Steven Mosher and Sex-Selection Abortions; Dr. Angela Franks' and Margaret Sanger's eugenic legacy; the 25th anniversary of National Teens for Life; a riveting account of a much-regretted abortion by Mark and LaRee Pickup; a crystal-clear explanation of ObamaCare presented by NRLC's Douglas Johnson and Burke Balch and a leadership award given to pro-life House Minority Leader John Boehner; and the immensely inspirational Monsignor James Lisante whose speech closed the convention at the Saturday night banquet.

Pastor Ed Szeto held up an "Umbert the Unborn" bumper sticker at the, "We are the Sheep...Where are the Shepherds?" workshop.

There were many important innovations at NRLC 2010. In the run up to the June 24-26 pro-life educational event of the year, attended by upwards of 1,000 people, NRLC staff sent the word out far and wide. In addition to creating a website for the convention, staff worked the social networks early and often. As evidence of the Movement's recognition of the new technologies, there were four separate workshops on how to best utilize the Internet in general, social networks (such as Facebook and Twitter) in particular. As someone who played a very small role in all this, I can attest that grassroots pro-lifers grasp the enormous potential.

The younger members of the staff, who imbibed the new technologies with their mother's milk, blogged through the convention. As Jonathan Rogers will explain tomorrow, this generated an enormous stream of traffic. Convention goers also had their pictures taken to share with their local newspapers.

There were several narratives running throughout our time together.

Jamie Thietten performed at both the Prayer Breakfast and the Closing Banquet.

First and foremost, in spite of Barack Obama and the pro-abortion Democratic majorities in both Houses of Congress, there is real reason for optimism. NRLC Executive Director David N. O'Steen, Ph.D., used a portion of the Saturday morning general session to make three points:

"Today in America, the normal is to be pro-life. More people identify as pro-life than pro-choice." (2) 61% of the public does not want government healthcare providing any funding for abortion. (3) "To answer a question from 2008, yes, we have hope," O'Steen said. "And we will remember in November."

Second, the fractures in the wall that has separated Americans from their consciences grows more pronounced almost daily.

Once almost invisible, images of the unborn child can be found attached to refrigerators all over the country. It's impossible to square 4-color real-time ultrasounds of squirming unborn babies with nonsense about "blobs of tissue."

In the same vein, if a pro-abortionist had snuck in while Steven Mosher talked about the horrific practice of sex-selection abortion, how would she/he merge support for "women's rights" with the systemic annihilation of unborn baby girls?

Adding to the cognitive dissonance, even for the hardest-hearted pro-abortionist, can they really accept that it okay to tear apart unborn children who are capable of experiencing pain? That is the challenge posed by Nebraska's "Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act."

Pro-abortionists no doubt felt better when a working group of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologist ponied up a bogus study purporting to prove that the unborn child can't experience pain at even at 24 weeks, let alone at 20 weeks, and perhaps not until considerably further along.

But I strongly suspect that they fear if the Supreme Court hears the evidence, the justices will uphold Nebraska's landmark legislation.

A tremendous convention, from start to finish. We've talked about it since Monday, including reproducing speeches, and will add additional details over the next week. In short order we will post the list of CDs that you can buy--the next best thing to being at NRLC 2010.

Please send all of your comments to daveandrusko@gmail.com. If you like, join those who are now following me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/daveha.