Menstruation and COVID-19
An urgent call for action because periods dont stop for pandemic
Menstruation is a natural biological process experienced by half of the world’s population for a significant part of their lives including women, girls, nonbinary, trans, intersex, and agender people. It is not just something that commenced before the COVID-19 outbreak and will stop after this pandemic rather it’s around-the-clock. When the whole world was busy pondering the resources to contain the virus and sustain the essential services required, availability, and accessibility to menstrual products were overlooked.
We might be thinking there are other pressing concerns in this middle of the pandemic. For instance there has been the outcry for the severe shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE) for frontline health workers to protect themselves and take care of the patients with COVID-19. PPE including masks are at the top of the list, of course, but there is another type of personal protective equipment that roughly 70 percent of health care workers worldwide who are female require while working at the frontlines: menstrual products. We have heard of challenges faced by health workers accessing menstrual products or change them while at work.
In the Chinese province of Hubei, where the COVID-19 hotspot of Wuhan is the capital and where 50% of the doctors and 90% of the nurses are women, Chinese healthcare workers reported going to extreme or creative measures to manage their menstruation while fighting COVID-19 ( Li 2020 ). Some employees suppressed their menstruation during the crisis through oral contraceptive pills, others bled directly onto their protective suits, without any menstrual materials to absorb or collect the flow. Many of such challenges are for safety reasons, such as the protocols in taking on and off a protective suit making it difficult for people to take quick breaks where they could change their menstrual materials. Other challenges that female health workers in Wuhan expressed related more to stigma and discrimination rather than the practical challenges of managing menstruation while on the front lines. For instance, initially, when donations of sanitary materials were made to hospitals and menstrual products were included, male managers reportedly turned away the menstrual products ( Reuters2020 and Li 2020 ). Public outcry on behalf of the female healthcare workers helped to reverse this — resulting in Chinese authorities sending menstrual materials to hospitals for staff and patients as a part of their COVID-19 critical medical supplies ( UNFPA 2020 and Zhou 2020 ). On one hand, gender analysis is very common jargon used during COVID-19 response while on the other hand it does not provide a single clue to intervene in the needs associated with menstruation. Surprisingly, the whole world centered PPE and other essentials for COVID-19 response but they outcasted biological need; menstruation.
The COVID-19 should not be an apology for turning out menstrual products from an essential service list. For instance, the official relief package from the Government of Nepal for wage labor included 30 Kgs rice, 3 Kgs pulse, 2 Kgs salt, 2 Liters cooking oil, 4 packed soap, and 2 Kgs sugar and not menstrual products. The physiological process regards to menstruation is not ceased in this pandemic either the women working in frontlines or women under lockdown. Along with travel restrictions and limited resources, other challenges might turn out for the women living under quarantine or isolation like there might not be conventional measures for them to change menstrual materials or may lack access to WASH and Menstrual Health and Hygiene supplies. The condition may still be nasty for rural women or people with disabilities. For instance, in settings where the poorest women and girls commonly use disposable materials, financial stress may lead to families to prioritize other needs such as food or essential utility bills over purchasing menstrual hygiene materials. Furthermore, limited access to critical information due to limited access to technology and digital platforms, school closures, suspension of community-based programming, and low levels of literacy in some settings (particularly among the most vulnerable) — particularly for adolescent girls may aggravate the situation.
Above all, gender analysis policies and plans, accessibility and availability of menstrual products in general and in quarantines, enlisting of menstrual hygiene products as essential supplies for female, disaggregated data on choice of menstrual products, access to sufficient quantity of PPE that would allow female health workers to take a break to change menstrual materials, access to WASH facilities and so on should come under the radar of the government in every crisis like this.
References:
1. https://www.spotlightnepal.com/2020/04/27/missing-menstruation-amidst-covid-19-pandemic/
3. https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2020/04/09/covid-19-period-taboo-gbv-and-its-consequences/
