This country taxes menstrual pads as luxury goods. She's suing to end the tax

This country taxes menstrual pads as luxury goods. She's suing to end the tax Bushra Mahnoor, photographed at home in Attock, Pakistan, advocates for the menstrual health of girls in Pakistan. "It was a big taboo mentioning that you were on your period. But mentioning that you were on your period without access to a pad was just even more humiliating," she says. Her non-profit Mahwari Justice last year filed a lawsuit to reclassify menstrual products as essential goods. Currently, menstrual pads are taxed as luxury products. Ben de la Cruz/NPR hide caption toggle caption Growing up, Bushra Mahnoor dreaded getting her period. It meant shame, stigma and, often, missing school. As an adolescent in Pakistan with four sisters, she says there were never enough period supplies in her home. They'd ration pads - regularly using ones designed for eight hours for well over 24 hours - and sometimes they had to use a rag or a spare cloth that could easily leak. Others face a similar situation. According to a report from UNICEF , published in 2025, only about one in 10 girls and women in Pakistan use commercially manufactured products. "When I knew I might not have a pad and I had to rely on a cloth, those were the times I could not even imagine going to the school," Mahnoor recalls, who is now 25. Her school uniform was pure white and she remembers a teacher ordering a classmate to stand by the back wall of the classroom so others wouldn't see a period stain on her uniform. "It was a big taboo mentioning that you were on your period. But mentioning that you were on your period without access to a pad was just even more humiliating," she says. So Mahnoor became a pro at coming up with excuses to stay home: A vague illness. A stomach ache. "I grew up with a lot of shame," she says. Now Mahnoor is trying to change the reality for girls in Pakistan. She's the executive director at Mahwari Justice , a nonprofit in Pakistan that advocates for menstrual health. In September 2025, she filed a lawsuit aimed at reclassifying menstrual products from luxury products to essential goods. The goal is to eliminate the taxes placed on the products - which she hopes will lower prices to make sanitary items more affordable. None of Mahnoor's experience comes as a surprise to Marni Sommer , a professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health who has been studying menstrual health for more than 20 years. "Accessing [menstrual] products is an issue pretty much everywhere," she says. Historically, she says this issue has slipped between the cracks of global health and development efforts because it does not fall neatly into one of the focus areas like education, water sanitation, gender and health and because it's a topic that's often stigmatized. "It's everybody's and nobody's at the same time," Sommer says. "That has made it quite difficult to...

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