Feminism

We measure menstrual health almost entirely in missed school days — a real cost, and a small fraction of the actual one. Period poverty compounds across a woman’s life.

No product, or an unsafe one, leads to reproductive tract infection. Left untreated, that can progress to pelvic inflammatory disease, and in some cases infertility — an unaffordable pad becomes a fertility diagnosis a decade later. Improvised products can cause toxic shock syndrome, sometimes ending in emergency hysterectomy; the alternative is death from sepsis.

Two-thirds of low-income women struggle to access products and a place to wash; unhoused women often make pads from rags and toilet paper. Only 24 states guarantee incarcerated women free products.

None of this appears in the statistics we cite as “period poverty.” It is filed as a school absence, a prison record, a shelter intake note, an emergency room chart — four separate problems instead of one continuous one.