Here’s an idea. Make members of Congress carry around an egg like sex ed teachers assign teenagers to sensitize them to the awesome responsibility of pregnancy. Have them stuff a bag of flour under their pin striped fronts which will grow harder to button day by day. Somehow come up with a way to simulate the physical siege on the body during labor and delivery.

Or, how about this? Have them happily knitting booties, suddenly miscarry and then be hauled off by the uterus police to prove it wasn’t an abortion.

Pregnancy drag – for the men who can’t be women but are obsessed with controlling women’s bodies. I know my ideas are ludicrous but so are some of the efforts by right wing leaders in what is now aptly called their “War on Women.”

The notion of the uterus police came up when Georgia legislator Bobby Franklin called for the state to investigate women who miscarry to prove it was God’s doing and not their own and a doctor’s. This reminded me of that classic thriller The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood which is worth re-reading, if only for the plot summary. The U.S. is taken over by religious, racist, misogynist fanatics who eliminate all rights for women. Women have one of two roles, baby makers or wives, decided by the rich men in power. Women are not allowed to hold jobs, read books or have any money of their own.

When Atwood’s book came out in the mid 1980s it was called a “feminist’s nightmare.” Now it might be called a conservative legislator’s wet dream. I’m sorry that sounds crude. But there are creepy, scary people making unwelcome moves on women’s bodies.

Maybe we need to stop being so ladylike and thinking “those silly, reckless boys, what will they do next?”

They’re going after reproductive choice and Planned Parenthood. They’d cut funding for prenatal care, breast exams and other cancer screenings, take away nutritional supplements for babies and do away with teen pregnancy prevention programs. Maryland officials would axe Head Start, which benefits working families, on the grounds that women should stay home with their children. Speaker John Boehner calls barring federal funding for abortion his highest priority.

Is this a war or a jihad? A blogger on the Vibrant Nation website, noting the current trend of women-bashing and legislating, said she’s started listing “all the good things about wearing a burqua–just in case.”

I look at the posters for International Women’s Day with those beautiful strong faces of determined, hopeful women who struggle so hard to achieve what we have long taken for granted – the ability to plan our families, get a healthy start for our babies. Are they looking at us now, wondering what’s happening?

When are we going to push back? Where are our marches? I take heart that we are of common purpose, no matter our politics or agenda. Consider the two Republican women from Wyoming, state legislators Sue Wallis and Lisa Shepperson who publicly went against the boys to say they refused to support any government meddling in what a woman and her doctor decide, including abortion.

We have come so far. We have much to lose, including the admiration and trust of women around the world. If we don’t stand together we’ll get the nightmare we deserve. And the others will just dream on.

In the tiny village of San Marcos on Lake Atitlan in the Guatemalan highlands there are houses built out of plastic bottles. Yes, those same awful water bottles, the scourge of environmentalists everywhere, have found new value because of a German woman who started out in fashion and ended up in garbage.
With International Women’s Day coming up on March 8, a day to celebrate the contributions of women around the world, I thought of Susana Heisse and how she’s made a surprising difference.

In this small lakeside village where Susana moved 10 years ago there are a lot of plastic bottles because there are many people who live here and visit who can’t drink the water. Even someone with a Northern California sensitivity to all things plastic is relieved to find a bottle of water waiting in the hotel room so you can brush your teeth or quench your thirst with something besides Coca Cola, Gallo beer or Chilean wine.

San Marcos and other small villages have no trash pick-up. There are no giant green trucks to go through neighborhoods once a week and pluck various bins of sorted garbage from the sidewalk. Plastic bottles end up being tossed into the magnificent lake or burned with other household waste. When Susana came to San Marcos she was horrified to see all that plastic going up in toxic smoke. Germans were savvy about recycling and household pollution long before most Americans.

Some still call her that “crazy gringa.”

So Susana started her own campaign which she calls Project Pura Vida (www.puravidaatitlan.org) to introduce the villagers on the difference between good garbage and bad garbage. She wrote a book about recycling and distributed it to villages all around the lake. And then she took on the piles of plastic bottles along with other discarded plastic in the form of candy wrappers and chip bags.
She did some research and discovered that plastic bottles, because they seemingly last forever, could be used as insulation in construction. She taught some of the townspeople to compact clean, dry plastic trash and put it into used plastic bottles to make what she calls “plastic bricks” and convinced a few local builders to try them.

Today in San Marcos you can see houses and fences and walls built from plastic bottles which are stuffed with plastic bags. Sometimes there’s a peek-hole in a wall so that you look in and marvel at all that plastic inside.
The bottles are stacked inside the wall like conventional insulation, sealed in place with chicken wire and then covered with cement. Susana says the walls are cheaper than those built with cement blocks. And they’re less rigid, too, in case of earthquakes which Guatemala has to worry about. When Hurricane Stan wiped out part of the town, a wall made out of plastic bottles survived.

Tall, curly-haired Susana in bright beaded earrings and gauzy skirt used to be a fashion designer in Germany. When she’s not mucking around with plastic she creates and sells necklaces and bracelets made from recycled jewelry.She told our visiting women studies group that when she moved to Guatemala she fell in love with its beauty. But she couldn’t enjoy it without helping to preserve it.

Some people still think her ideas are wild, she said, and call her “that crazy gringa.” But in a world looking for ways to save itself, Susana has devised her own style of stimulus package. Little kids bring her their old candy wrappers. She gives them a marble or another toy. Then she makes a brick.

Pura Vida photo with Susana Heisse at left