A tampon tax is bad enough. Using it to fund anti-abortionists is a disgrace (The Guardian)

[Rhiannon12866]

Women have no choice about having periods. To give tax raised on sanitary products to a group that seeks to limit their choice further is unconscionable

Only women bleed, sang Alice Cooper. And only women pay taxes on the products they use to deal with the fact that this happens. Sanitary products such as tampons are taxed as non-essential, luxury items at 5%. So are maternity pads. Some products remain exempt from this tax – such as edible sugar flowers and alcoholic jellies – but tampons are our little treat, aren’t they? We spoil ourselves silly with such luxury.

Actually lately there have been horrendous reports of girls not going to school because they cannot afford sanitary protection. It is shocking that period poverty should be happening in 2017 – but it is. Recently I watched products being distributed in a homeless shelter – tampons were the first thing women asked for. This is an expense that women have little choice about. If the average woman menstruates 450 times over a lifetime, it is estimated that will have cost her £18,450 (taking into account sanitary protection, pain relief and new underwear).

The reason we are talking about tampon tax again is that though the Tories pledged to scrap this 5% VAT, they didn’t. Instead George Osborne said that £15m a year would go from the tax to women’s charities. There was always something odd about this. You ladies pay for your periods and now pay towards domestic violence refuges and rape crisis centres because these are simply “women’s things”. Shouldn’t a share of all taxes go to these organisations anyway? Where does the VAT men pay on razors go? To special manly things?

Still, to quibble about funding essential services for women in the current climate only gets you so far. Services have been so decimated that when last week the government announced that 70 organisations would share £12m from the “tampon tax”, it was able to claim to be helping disadvantaged women and girls throughout the country.


More: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/03/tampon-tax-life-anti-abortion-funds?CMP=share_btn_tw

[pfitz59]

1. I have worked with homeless groups

and its true, the first thing women ask for is hygiene products..

[Rhiannon12866]

2. And this is Britain, where products are available

In the late '80s, I went with my grandmother to the USSR as part of a peace group. I thought I'd brought enough supplies with me, but I gave some to a girl I met on the plane and I ran out. Yikes! That was a nightmare since there was nothing available in any stores, guess they deal with these things the way women did in this country a few generations ago.

I had to "make do" for a day or two until we flew back and had a stop over in Finland(!), and since I don't read Finnish, I had to look on the photos on the packages to figure out what was in them. Fortunately, I guessed right...

So I experienced what it's like to "do without" and I can't imagine how it must be like to suffer like that on a regular basis.