Sandra Fluke: Future for Women Bleak Under Romney

Sandra Fluke tonight no doubt made Rush Limbaugh and the GOP rue the day the commentator called her a "slut" for demanding women's access to birth control. She painted a foreboding, almost apocalyptic, vision of life for American women under a Republican president, and had women in the audience cheering and tearful. "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. That future could be real," she warned. "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."

It may be an America, she warned, where states "humiliate women by forcing us to endure invasive ultrasounds we don't want and our doctors say we don't need." Or, Fluke added, voters can choose "an America in which our president, when he hears a young woman has been verbally attacked, thinks of his daughters—not his delegates or donors." The election will determine if we live in a country where "our president either has our back, or turns his back," she added. "We talk often about choice," Fluke concluded. "Well, ladies—and gentlemen—it's time to choose." (More Democratic National Convention stories.)