Breaking the Silence on Period Poverty in Pakistan
For years, Mahnoor Omer didn’t talk about it. Every time the topic arose, her school friends in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, flushed with embarrassment, Omer recalled. “This happened so many times. A class fellow of mine would get her period during class,” she told CNN late last year. “Her white kameez on the back was entirely red. She freaked out. She had absolutely no idea what was going on with her.”
“I think what we’ve started here is not a legal case, but a movement to now bring period poverty to the forefront,” said Omer.
Now, the 25-year-old lawyer and her colleague, Ahsan Jehangir Khan, 29, are trying to rip apart that stigma – and ensure girls and women can access the sanitary products they need – through a landmark legal case which calls on the government to remove tax on menstrual products and categorize them as essential goods instead of luxury items.
Several medical workers and women’s rights activists who support the case told CNN that pervasive social taboos over sexual health in Pakistan have led to tax policies that prevent swathes of the population from being able to afford essential sanitary items, exacerbating gender inequalities in education, health and social welfare.
“In the Global South, people or governments are talking about this. We should be the ones taking charge,” Khan told CNN.
CNN has reached out to Pakistan’s health ministry for comment on the case. Bushra Mahnoor, a reproductive rights activist, counts herself among a small proportion of women and girls in Pakistan – about 12%, according to the UN’s children’s agency (UNICEF) – who use commercial sanitary products, rather than homemade alternatives.
Even so, menstrual products were a “luxury” in her family home, she said, adding that she often lined her pads with cotton, or used cleaning rags, to try to make them last for hours longer than medically advised. “Periods were very traumatic during my whole childhood,” the 22-year-old from Attock, a small town in Punjab province, northern Pakistan, told CNN. She started menstruating at the age of 10 – a “very isolating” chapter of life, she said.
Lawyers say that by applying tax to sanitary items, the Pakistani government has systemically neglected women’s and girls’ rights to health and education – impeding their ability to fully participate in public life – and violated Article 25 of the Constitution, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex. Under the Sales Tax Act of 1990, an 18% sales tax was imposed on locally made sanitary pads and a 25% customs tax on imported menstrual items, according to the legal petition published by Omer and Khan in October.
