As a woman, a daily struggle for what I can say is the majority of many other women is accessibility to all feminine hygienic products, particularly menstrual care. As menstrual products provided in stores are already expensive enough, the very least a woman can ask is for free period products to be provided by employers and administrators of public establishments, such as schools. 

 “Period poverty” is a fairly new term denoting the challenges that low-income women face in affording menstrual products and services. Poor education for low-income girls also plays a major role in equitable access to menstrual hygiene.

Period poverty affects not only developing countries. Studies stemming from the UK, where menstrual products have been especially unaffordable since the pandemic, have shown girls and women struggling greatly to find access to products. A survey conducted on World Menstrual Health Day (May 28) reported that three in ten women in the UK struggled to afford products to manage monthly periods, and over 54% of them were having to use toilet paper as their only other alternative. Another study reported that 21% of women did not leave their home for over six months due to the lack of access to period products, and another 49% of women and girls had to miss an entire day of school from having no availability to menstrual products. Additionally, 19% of women in the UK have reported switching to less appropriate products due to prohibitive prices.

In parts of the world that are mired in crisis, the problem can be worse. In Gaza, the need for menstrual products has become desperate since the war began in October. Women have complained how pads and tampons, if available at all, are up to six times the normal pricing.

The health, economic, and educational benefits of free, high-quality menstrual products would suggest that public high schools, where students need to stay in place for nearly eight hours per day, should be early adopters.

At NASH, for example, free tampons are available in a few girls’ restrooms, but they are unanimously consider inferior. There are others dispensers that require a 25 cent payment, though I could not find a single girl at NASH who remembers ever using those dispensers. In actuality, the overwhelming majority of girls in this school carry their own pads and tampons from home, complaining about the quality of menstrual products in the bathrooms.

The truth is that when a girl in this school needs a tampon, she will almost always ask a friend. If we had better quality products in the restrooms, that would not be an issue.

But there are occasions when a girl may be seriously limited to options in that moment and have no other choice but to use their own money, use a low-quality free tampon, or stuff their pants temporarily with toilet paper in order to make it to class without bleeding through. It seems to me that paying real money in order to comfortably stop oneself from bleeding is absurd and disgraceful. 

All schools can do better for their female students. The 25 cent dispensers at NASH should be removed, and the free baskets should be provided in all restrooms and stocked with products of respectable quality. In schools such as ours that are clearly thriving, it’s hard to believe that the district budget depends on the quarters collected from a young woman’s menstrual cycle. 

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Editors’ note: All opinions expressed on The Uproar are a reflection solely of the beliefs of the bylined author and not the journalism program at NASH.  We continue to welcome school-appropriate comments and guest articles.