Where are the Women on the Mandate? Hear Some of us Roar!

As Helen Alvere and Kim Daniels explain on National Review Online:

 . . .over the past several days we’ve heard House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and others repeatedly ask those who oppose the contraceptive mandate, “Where are the women?”

Here we are.

We listened to prominent women purport to speak for us. We watched them duck the fundamental religious-liberty issues at stake. And we saw them assume that all women view cheaper contraceptives and abortion-causing drugs as unqualified goods.

In response, we circulated an open letter to a few dozen of our female friends in support of the competing voice offered by Catholic institutions on matters of sex, marriage, and family life. The letter spread, and in 72 hours we received some 750 signatures from a diverse group of women across the country, including women serving overseas. Signatures are still flooding in. Doctors, nurses, lawyers, teachers, mothers, business owners, community volunteers, scholars — women from all walks of life are proud to stand together with the Catholic Church and its invaluable witness.

I was one of the 750 woman signing on to this letter from the beginning, though my  name hasn't yet made it onto the website. More from the letter.....

Those currently invoking “women’s health” in an attempt to shout down anyone who
disagrees with forcing religious institutions or individuals to violate deeply held beliefs
are more than a little mistaken, and more than a little dishonest. Even setting aside their
simplistic equation of “costless” birth control with “equality,” note that they have never
responded to the large body of scholarly research indicating that many forms of
contraception have serious side effects, or that some forms act at some times to destroy
embryos, or that government contraceptive programs inevitably change the sex, dating
and marriage markets in ways that lead to more empty sex, more non-marital births and
more abortions. It is women who suffer disproportionately when these things happen.

Another great contribution to this "roar" is Erika Bachiochi and Catherine Pakaluk's article questioning just how good the Pill has really been for women:

And this points to an unresolved difficulty with the contraceptive revolution, which was supposed to serve women above all: Women on the whole disproportionately bear the burden of the new sexual regime. They are expected to dose themselves with a Group 1 carcinogen for approximately two-thirds of their fertile years. They sustain greater emotional costs from casual sex. They are at greater risk of contracting STDs and disproportionately suffer from their long-term consequences, such as cervical cancer and fertility loss.And even after 50 years with the Pill, as many as half of all pregnancies are still unintended. Women, not men, must make the heart-wrenching choice between abortion, reckoned a tragic outcome even by its supporters, and bearing a child with little to no paternal support. After all, since children were negotiated out of the bargain by the availability of contraception and abortion, men have secured a strong rationale to simply ignore or reject pregnancies that result from uncommitted sexual relations. Nobel-laureate economist George Akerlof predicted nearly two decades ago that this would lead directly to the feminization of poverty, as it ruefully has.