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September 6, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Scheduling changes meant the Democratic National Convention heard from Sandra Fluke earlier than usual, with the shake-up catapulting the well-known Georgetown law student into a prime time slot.

Her remarks revolved largely around her own recent history.

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“Some of you may remember that earlier this year, Republicans shut me out of a hearing on contraception,” she began. “In fact, on that panel, they didn’t hear from a single woman, even though they were debating an issue that affects nearly every woman.”

The Government Oversight Committee hearing – which had to do with whether the HHS birth control mandate violated religious liberty – actually heard from two female witnesses. Republicans said they excluded Fluke because she had no expertise on the First Amendment or issues relating to the establishment clause. 

Presenting her version of an anti-feminist dystopia, she warned in a few short months “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.”

Barack Obama’s second term would be far different, she said. “First of all, we’d have the right to choose.”

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Fluke also warned that Romney’s running-mate, Paul Ryan, “co-sponsored a bill that would allow pregnant women to die preventable deaths in our emergency rooms.” The remark echoed a similar statement made by Nancy Pelosi last year, that by supporting the Protect Life Act Republicans were saying “that women can die on the floor and health care providers do not have to intervene.”

Ryan’s measure did “nothing of the sort, but the audience loved it,” wrote Dave Andrusko of National Right to Life News, in response to Fluke’s claim. 

The claim was based upon the conscience-protection language in the Protect Life Act, which stated that the federal health care bill shall not “require any health plan to provide coverage of or access to abortion services.” Advocates of the bill had pointed out that the law already requires hospital staff to stabilize the mother and her “unborn child” in an emergency room, just not necessarily by directly killing her baby. 

One leader in the pro-life movement accused Fluke of siding with the real perpetrators of violence against women.

“We have news for Sandra Fluke. Women are already dying in our emergency rooms from botched abortions while President Obama looks the other way. Just ask the family of Tonya Reaves,” said Troy Newman, president of Operation Rescue.

“Ms. Fluke ignores the plight of women like Tonya Reaves, Laura Smith, Alexandra Nunez, and thousands of others while attempting to inflame with faulty hypotheticals,” Newman said. “If she really wanted to help women, she would work to close abortion clinics where women are injured and killed on a regular basis.”