At a hearing of the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee yesterday, a single witness — Georgetown law student and “reproductive rights activist” Sandra Fluke — told sympathetic policy-makers that the administration’s so-called contraception mandate should stand … because her peers are going broke buying birth control.

“Forty percent of the female students at Georgetown Law reported to us that they struggled financially as a result of this policy (Georgetown student insurance not covering contraception),” Fluke reported.

It costs a female student $3,000 to have protected sex over the course of her three-year stint in law school, according to her calculations.

“Without insurance coverage, contraception, as you know, can cost a woman over $3,000 during law school,” Fluke told the hearing.

Craig Bannister at CNSNews.com did the math — and discovered that these co-eds, assuming they’re using the cheapest possible contraception, must be having sex about three times a day every day to incur that kind of expense. What Fluke is arguing, then, is that her fellow law students have a right to consequence-free sex whenever, wherever. Why, exactly, especially if it costs other people something? When I can’t pay for something, I do without it. Fortunately, in the case of contraception, women can make lifestyle choices that render it unnecessary.

At one point, Fluke mentions a friend who felt “embarrassed and powerless” when she learned her insurance didn’t cover contraception. Can you imagine how proud and empowered that same friend would be if she learned she has the ability to resist her own sexual urges? We can only assume she doesn’t know that because Fluke and she both labor under the illusion that contraception is a medical necessity.

Some little part of Fluke must recognize that it’s not … because she sought to bolster her argument with an example of an illness in which contraception might be a medically necessary treatment. Another friend of hers, she said, has polycystic ovarian syndrome, for which contraception is a common treatment. Some insurance programs that don’t cover contraception normally would nevertheless cover it as a treatment for PCOS — but other insurance programs wouldn’t. Fluke makes it sound like contraception is the only treatment for PCOS. In fact, it isn’t — and contraception is prescribed as a treatment only when the woman also wants to contracept. Fluke says her friend is a lesbian — and so wouldn’t need contraception. Why didn’t she opt for any of the other treatments, then?

At the end of her testimony, Fluke spoke in strong language of her resentment of university administrators and others who suggest she should have chosen to attend a different university that would have offered student insurance that does cover contraception — even if that other university wasn’t quite as prestigious as Georgetown.

“We refuse to pick between a quality education and our health and we resent that, in the 21st Century, anyone thinks it’s acceptable to ask us to make that choice simply because we are women,” Fluke said.

Ms. Fluke, I resent that you think women are incapable of controlling themselves, of sacrificing temporary pleasure for the sake of long-term success. You make us sound like animals, slaves to our instincts and able to be used, but we’re better than that. We’re persons, equal to men in dignity and love.