Combating 'Period Poverty': MCG students seek to help women afford menstrual products

More than one in five women in the U.S. struggle to pay for the tampons, pads and liners they need for their monthly menstrual cycle. A group of Medical College of Georgia and Augusta University students want to change that.

Known as "period poverty" it is a real problem, especially for younger women. A 2019 Harris Poll of women ages 13-19 found that 20% found it difficult to pay for or could not afford menstrual products. The average woman will need about 25 tampons a month, as well as other products. At Walgreens, one box of 34 costs $10 plus tax. A 2021 revisiting of the Harris Poll showed that had risen to 23% and 16% put off buying something else like food or clothes in favor of menstrual products.

This issue had a real impact on lives - 84% said they or someone they knew had been forced to miss school as a result. A study published in BMC Women's Health, a peer-reviewed journal, found that period poverty had a strong correlation with depression and anxiety among college women – 61%.

Those concerns prompted Brooke Amero and Gabriela Duchesne to join a chapter of Period, a national group advocating for change on menstrual issues, while at the University of Georgia and to start their own chapter at MCG as first-year medical students. Fellow first-year student Katherine Dunn helped start a GoFundMe campaign to fuel their efforts.

"GoFundMe is a good way to kind of get us off the ground and get a base amount of money we can use to start distributing the products," Dunn said.

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So far, the group has purchased about 4,000 menstrual products that it plans to begin distributing through the student-run health clinics and some events, Amero said. The first big public event will be Saturday at Masters Table Soup Kitchen, 702 Fenwick St.. They plan to be there from 10:30 a.m. to noon.

Homeless women are another group their effort is trying to reach, Duchesne said.

"There’s a great need for hygiene products for this population because they are expensive and they may not have access to them," she said.

The MCG chapter has also reached out to undergraduates at AU "so they can help with the fundraising and setting up their own committees and teams," said first-year student Brittany Sheffield. "We’re hoping that by expanding our team we can increase our fundraising that way too."

The group would also like to do education, to reach out to Augusta schools about giving talks to help combat some of the stigmas that have grown up about the menstrual cycle, Amero said. The chapter has already held a talk with fellow medical students to combat myths that the period is somehow "dirty, that women are less powerful and less capable when they are on their period," she said. "Ideas like that are propagated throughout our society. We definitely want to focus on talking about menstruation more, how it is a very natural process."

There are larger policy issues as well, Duchesne said. Not only are menstrual products expensive but they are "taxed, when some products that aren’t as essential, like Viagra or balding products, are not," she said. While 23 states have removed that tax, Georgia and South Carolina are still among those that tax menstrual products.

Also, federal poverty programs like Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program funds cannot be spent on menstrual products, although some states like Illinois have asked for a waiver from that rule.

Bills that would remove the tax from menstrual products, and ask for a waiver for federal funds to be used to purchase them, have been introduced in the Georgia House of Representatives, but none appear to have gotten as far as a committee hearing so far.