How The Period Movement Threatens To Take Away Your Stuff

(Source: Flickr)

Period, Inc. is a national non-profit motivated by the belief that menstrual hygiene is a basic right and has successfully lobbied numerous university administrations throughout the country through its local campus chapters to pay for and supply menstrual products in university bathrooms. UT-Tyler even has a chapter. However, despite all of its fanfare, its claim to menstrual hygiene provides the philosophical framework for legalized theft. Here is why.

Menstrual hygiene is not a basic right because it takes other people’s products and services to realize menstrual hygiene.

If you think about it, if the output of menstrual hygiene is your basic right, then by extension you have the right to acquire the inputs to realize this right. And you can’t have menstrual hygiene without medical products and services, without tampons and doctor’s examinations. Therefore, what you are really doing in claiming menstrual hygiene as your basic right is making a claim on other people’s property.

For example, unless you are a tampon manufacturer and a licensed practicing doctor, you lack the products, knowledge and skill to promote basic menstrual hygiene. You don’t have tampons. You don’t have specialized knowledge about your anatomy and you don’t have the experience of competently applying this knowledge over time. This means that if you are going to get these things to obtain proper menstrual health, then you must acquire them from other people.

Basic Right Removes Incentive 

But ask yourself this: would you pay to see a doctor when you already have a basic right to her services according to your doctrine of menstrual hygiene? Would you pay a retailer or manufacturer who has tampons when you already have a basic right to their product?

No, you would not, because unlike the market setting where you need to purchase ownership of something in order to possess it, here you already have a basic right to possess these things by virtue of your existence. So no, you would not have to pay these people. And if you have already have a right to their services and you do not need to pay them, then this means their services to you should be free. It takes away the need to purchase rights to other people’s stuff if you already have a right to it in the first place.

Yet, by this logic that menstrual hygiene is a basic right, what if these suppliers--these doctors and manufacturers--what if they refuse to service you for free even though menstrual hygiene is your basic right? Why, then they are doing you an injustice. They deny your rights to menstrual hygiene by doing so. And to whom else do we run to see our basic rights enforced except to the government? This is how the government gets involved.

Government And Class Warfare

The government will intervene and either compel these people to service and supply you or it will tax these people to fund the government to service and supply you. Either way, the government will see to it that you get your menstrual hygiene and it will do it by taking from other people. This is the inevitable, yet logical outcome of the idea that menstrual hygiene is a basic, inherent right. It unleashes government coercion and intervention of unprecedented scales.

So when someone says that menstrual hygiene is a basic right, they are effectively laying the philosophical groundwork for a bigger, more intrusive government that roughs up and steals from one portion of the population in service to another. It is simply class warfare with government as the weapon. We would be better off without it.

Instead, we all would be better off if we encouraged a culture of individual achievement where people could afford quality menstrual care through their productivity. That is, that they earn enough money through their contributions to others that they are able to purchase whatever products and service they want in order to obtain the level of menstrual hygiene they desire.

This leads to a far less harmful and a much more dignified society. It’s a society in which we would all be much less resentful and much better off.

But make no mistake, if proponents continue to press the idea that menstrual hygiene is a basic right, the policies that form around this idea will just provide more and more evidence that the menstrual movement’s “basic right” talk is--either knowingly or unknowingly--just a dressed-up way to talk about stealing other people’s stuff.

Twitter: @jhescock