Ryan Grim writes a few paragraphs down in this piece:

At a late-night White House meeting between the president and key congressional leaders, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) made clear that his conference would not approve funding for the government if any money were allowed to flow to Planned Parenthood through legislation known as Title X. “This comes down to women’s health issues related to Title X,” a person in the meeting told HuffPost.

The negotiations are dominated by men: All of the principal negotiators in both parties are male, as are most of the senior staff involved. (House Democrats, led by Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), have largely been left out of key talks.)

House Republicans have been insisting the roadblock to cutting a new budget deal is not just the culture-war riders attached to the spending plan, but a source familiar with a top-level White House meeting earlier Thursday said most of the discussion in fact was about the riders.

Clearly, these negotiators, mostly white men, know absolutely nothing about the toll that too many pregnancies can have on a woman’s health, maybe even her life.

My mother died in her mid-fifties… she had six children in ten years, and that kind of close placement in birth order takes a toll on a woman’s health. A woman used to lose a tooth with every pregnancy. Women with dental insurance may not have that happen, but those without it may. There are other issues: incontinence, a prolapsed uterus, hemorrhoids, vascular trouble if one has a C-section. Of course, these white men know nothing of these burdens placed on women’s health, because they only want as many babies to be born as possible, in order, as Rick Santorum said recently, to shore up Social Security. Good grief! What are women, anyway, mere chattel? To be used by men according to their agenda?

Thankfully, I am past the age of child-bearing. But many of my friends and their daughters are not. This is a war against women… women have every right to determine how they can best live their lives, just as men do, but nooooo…. these men want women to stay barefoot and pregnant. And in the kitchen, most likely.

Nor do they understand that Planned Parenthood provides necessary health care services for women in underserved rural areas, where doctors are few. Why would Republican men, who go on and on and on about their family values, wish to see women, who already have a family of children, die, leaving their children motherless, just because they don’t want Planned Parenthood to subsidize pap smears and mammograms, or provide birth control, so that these women can live long enough to see their grandchildren?

Shades of Chris Christie, who thinks younger women should not even have mammograms… I wonder what he would say if his wife had a lump in her breast. After all, they have several young children. Doctors who examine women for breast lumps and who send pap smears to the lab are the only people who should be making medical decisions.

I doubt that most of those white men in Congress have medical degrees; most of them I suspect are lawyers and a bit argumentative. as well.