It’s that time of the month. Your “monthly visitor,” like an overbearing relative who you can't escape, has arrived yet again at a very inopportune time.
Panicked, you raise your hand and ask your professor if you can use the restroom, where you discover that you forgot to replenish the menstrual products you usually keep in your backpack. You rummage through your pockets and shove some spare change into the dilapidated tampon machine, but to no surprise, it is empty.
After class, you hurriedly trek fifteen minutes from Dey Hall to the CVS on Franklin Street, where you grab two boxes of Always pads. There goes a chunk of your monthly budget and an hour that you could have spent studying for tomorrow’s midterm.
Menstruation shouldn’t be this inconvenient.
Though we ought to acknowledge how students have catalyzed substantive progress relating to period care, UNC must also strive to sustain these efforts.
In 2016, for instance, former UNC student Zaynab Nasif helped the Carolina Union Board of Directors pass an initiative making hygiene products available in the Student Union. Nasif’s work serves as an essential foundation for success – one that we must continue building upon.
UNC’s next steps should be to scale this initiative across campus and offer menstrual products for free. Students need these resources so that they can focus on learning, rather than fret over absurd costs, timely transportation and unjust stigmatization of their cycle.
Fortunately, several North Carolina universities model how progress is very possible, such as N.C. State University. Layla Saliba, an N.C. State student who leads advocacy group We Bleed Red, surveyed 36 bathrooms at the school and discovered that menstrual products were virtually inaccessible to students. Her findings motivated her to raise awareness for this issue and demand change.
“Condoms are seen as a public health item. We think pads and tampons should also be seen as a public health item,” Saliba said in an interview with Spectrum News.