Planned Parenthood has come up with a big pink sign that it plants next to Republican campaign placards. It says, “Women are Watching.”

There’s been plenty for women to keep an eye on.  The Republican chant to take this country back apparently includes taking back some basic reproductive rights for women.

We’ve heard it before from the Republican front. They don’t trust a woman to choose what’s best for herself and her family when it comes to baby-making. They seem to think that that family planning should be practiced only by God.

If you are a woman and you are watching you might wonder what century does this backward brotherhood come from? What country are we living in? If you are a woman living in a so-called backward country that looks to America as a model of freedom, you might be asking, what’s going on, sisters?

Of course the abortion debate is standard Republican rhetoric. One candidate brings it up and they all follow like a chorus of neighborhood dogs barking at the garbage truck. And enjoying it as much.

Oh good, here comes abortion, let’s all get crazy.

But this time around they added in this unbelievably dumb idea that birth control is a bad thing. Rick Santorum was clearly the alpha dog on this one, declaring that contraception is “a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”

Wait a minute, Rick. Think back to your sex ed years, although maybe you had parental permission to skip class. Doing things in a sexual realm without contraception is a license to cause unwanted pregnancies and invite terrible diseases including AIDS.

Santorum says it should be okay for states to make birth control illegal. And how would he do this? With diaphragm detectives, pill police, a raid on the rubber aisle at Rite-Aid?

It’s tempting to turn it into a bad joke except that being the  champion of non recreational sex plays well with the Christian Conservative extremist vote. And yes, I know that bloc includes women.  But for women who believe in keeping the government out of the bedroom and ob-gyn clinics, this patriarchal playlist is disturbing.

After the New Hampshire primary Cecile Richards, head of Planned Parenthood, told Rachel Maddow the Republican primary is “absolutely a race to the bottom for women, where they are trying to outdo themselves on who would be the worst president for women.”

The Republicans have long tried to paint Planned Parenthood as abortion central, ignoring that its services include safe sex counseling, cancer screenings and preparation for pregnancy.  They would eliminate Title X, the federal program that gives low income women access to family planning programs. They would prohibit American health agencies operating in foreign countries from even mentioning abortion. Rick Perry is crowing over Texas forcing doctors to show a sonogram to any pregnant woman before she gets an abortion.

Maybe when the pack of GOP hopefuls thins down to a couple of real candidates they’ll have to talk about issues more crucial than who’s toughest on women bodies.

Like what jobs the job creators are ready to offer. What to do for people without health insurance. How to protect the country from more ruin by banks and big business. What’s better than Social Security and Medicare.  How to give all children, including poor kids, an equal chance.

On this,  women will definitely be watching. With the same eye on Democrats and President Obama, too.

Lately I’ve been turning to news about women in other countries instead of my own to feel better about gender progress. Women in Saudi Arabia get the vote.  Libyan women help lead their revolution.

So, what have we done for ourselves lately?

I know it’s relative. American women have many freedoms. And Saudi women still can’t drive. But of the best places in the world to be a woman, the United States currently ranks number eight, said a Newsweek report.

It helped to meet up with Jackie Speier, the Bay Area Democratic Congresswoman who earlier this year delivered what some dubbed “the speech heard round the world.” Jackie, you’ll remember, told a colleague he didn’t know squat abut women and abortion. Then she stood on the floor of the House and told her own story about having to abort at 17 weeks due to a medical complication.

It was a purely spontaneous reaction she recalled at a recent talk I attended.  In the debate over funding Planned Parenthood New Jersey Republican Chris Smith read graphic descriptions about abortion. When he started in about a leg being pulled out and sawed off Jackie said she had to scrap her intended speech and take him on.

After it was over she said she was “kind of trembling” but the response was overwhelmingly positive. John Lewis, the congressman from Georgia, told her it was the most incredible speech he’d heard on the floor.

“He said it took him back to when he was a young boy and his aunt one day appeared with blood all over her dress. His mother took his aunt to the hospital and she never came home again.”

With Jackie’s help Planned Parenthood held onto its funding. It also gained a huge increase in members.

Most people first heard about Jackie Speier in 1978 when she was shot but survived the massacre at Jonestown which killed her boss Congressman Leo Ryan. She’s no lightweight. She walks into a room with her big smile and pile of auburn hair and starts talking about how we’re really in trouble, especially women, and she has some ideas.

In her talk at a women’s networking organization in Sonoma County, not all women, not all Democrats, Jackie brought up two more issues that get her going.  Rape in the military and sexual trafficking.

She’s been collecting accounts of soldiers raping soldiers and has started telling them one story at a time on the floor of the House. There’s an Army sergeant who went to her military chaplain and was told the rape might have been God’s will and she needed to go to church more.

Jackie said: “I cannot stand that a soldier could be the object of violence from another solider, more than from the enemy.”

She’s also working to toughen laws against sex trafficking in this country, which she said has increased with the internet and since drug cartels began taking over. She told about a 16 year old girl who was forced to have sex from 10 to 14 times a day.

At a time when the communication skills of many government leaders seem to range from equivocation to hiding under their seats, it’s so refreshing to meet a Jackie Speier who is unafraid to speak the truth to power.

Jackie said, “I may not be senior enough to get things through committee but I can use the floor of the House.”

Not surprising one of her guiding quotes is, “Well behaved women seldom make history.”

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.