Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown University law graduate who became a national figure during the debate over the administration’s contraception mandate, attacked Mitt Romney and his running mate, Paul Ryan, for their stance on women's issues Wednesday during her Democratic National Convention speech.
"During this campaign, we've heard about the two profoundly different futures that could await women — and how one of those futures looks like an offensive, obsolete relic of our past," Fluke said. "Warnings of that future are not distractions. They're not imagined. That future could be real."
After walking onstage to a raucous standing ovation from the crowd, Fluke laid out her vision for a nation under a Romney administration, saying Republicans' strict stance on women's health issues like abortion and birth control would "humiliate women" and leave them abandoned.
"In that America, your new president could be a man who stands by when a public figure tries to silence a private citizen with hateful slurs. Who won't stand up to the slurs, or to any of the extreme, bigoted voices in his own party," Fluke said.
"It would be an America in which you have a new vice president who co-sponsored a bill that would allow pregnant women to die preventable deaths in our emergency rooms; an America in which states humiliate women by forcing us to endure invasive ultrasounds we don't want and our doctors say we don't need; an America in which access to birth control is controlled by people who will never use it, in which politicians redefine rape so survivors are victimized all over again, in which someone decides which domestic violence victims deserve help and which don't," she continued.
Fluke joined a fleet of Democratic women on the second night of the DNC praising President Obama for his work and support of women's health issues.
