The Democratic National Convention bumped Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke up into the 10 p.m. hour, where she received a standing ovation and told delegates they faced a choice between “a country where our president either has our back or turns his back.”
“Some of you may remember that earlier this year Republicans shut me out from a hearing on contraception,” Fluke said, adding that “too many women are shut out and silenced” on the issue.
“It easily could have been any one of you,” she said. “I’m here because I spoke out and this November each of us must speak out.”
She criticized Mitt Romney for not standing up for her against the “extreme, bigoted voices in his own party” when she was the target of slurs and called his policies an “offensive, obsolete relic of our past.”
Fluke accused Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) of supporting legislation that would “allow women to die preventable deaths” in emergency rooms.
“We know what this America would look like … but that’s not the America we should be and it’s not who we are,” she said of a Romney-Ryan administration.
She lauded President Obama as a man who, when she was attacked, “thinks of his daughters, not his delegates or his donors.”
“Over the last six months I’ve seen what these two futures look like,” Fluke said. “…We talk often about choice; well, ladies and gentlemen, it’s now time to choose.”
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