Periods, as in periods, is the new frontier of the social justice movement.
Not long ago, after widespread activist pressure,
Obama opposed the (non-existent) "tampon tax."
Now, a Columbia University female student has decided that Columbia should provide her—and all "people who menstruate"—with free tampons and assorted "period-related" items from sanitary napkins to painkillers.
Writing in the
Columbia Spectator, this student writes,
Columbia should pay for my period:
Sure, I can easily find a free condom on Barnard and Columbia’s campuses, but why can’t I find a free tampon in the bathrooms in Hamilton or Milbank? Why does the administration care about my sexual protective rights, but not how I handle my monthly menstrual cycle?
Limited access to free sanitary products, along with the widely recognized “tampon tax,” is a frequently recurring topic in popular discourse regarding reproductive rights. While California may have pioneered potentially eliminating the tampon tax at the state level, many people who menstruate still lack the sufficient financial resources to frequently purchase sanitary products. And even if the sales tax is removed from these products, we must still front the cost to pay for other menstruation-related items, such as pads, DivaCups, painkillers, and birth control.
This adds up, she reasons, to almost a hundred dollars a year.