For years, Mahnoor Omer didn’t speak about it.
Every time the matter arose, her college pals in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, flushed with embarrassment, Omer recalled.
“This happened so many times. A class fellow of mine would get her period during class,” she instructed NCS late final 12 months. “Her white kameez on the back was entirely red. She freaked out. She had absolutely no idea what was going on with her.”
Now, the 25-year-old lawyer and her colleague, Ahsan Jehangir Khan, 29, are attempting to rip aside that stigma – and guarantee women and girls can entry the sanitary merchandise they want – by way of a landmark authorized case which calls on the government to take away tax on menstrual merchandise and categorize them as important items as a substitute of luxurious gadgets.
Several medical employees and girls’s rights activists who help the case instructed NCS that pervasive social taboos over sexual health in Pakistan have led to tax insurance policies that forestall swathes of the inhabitants from having the ability to afford important sanitary gadgets, exacerbating gender inequalities in schooling, health and social welfare.
“I think what we’ve started here is not a legal case, but a movement to now bring period poverty to the forefront,” mentioned Omer.
Omer, the petitioner in the case, and Khan, who is representing her, say they hope to replicate the success of comparable efforts elsewhere, which have led to governments both lowering taxes on interval merchandise or slashing them altogether – together with in India and Nepal.
That regional ripple of legislative change “emboldened” them, Khan instructed NCS, including: “In the Global South, people or governments are talking about this. We should be the ones taking charge.”
NCS has reached out to Pakistan’s health ministry for touch upon the case.
Bushra Mahnoor, a reproductive rights activist, counts herself amongst a small proportion of ladies and ladies in Pakistan – about 12%, in accordance to the UN’s children’s agency (UNICEF) – who use industrial sanitary merchandise, somewhat than home made alternate options.
Even so, menstrual merchandise have been a “luxury” in her household house, she mentioned, including that she typically lined her pads with cotton, or used cleansing rags, to strive to make them final for hours longer than medically suggested.
“Periods were very traumatic during my whole childhood,” the 22-year-old from Attock, a small city in Punjab province, northern Pakistan, instructed NCS. She began menstruating at the age of 10 – a “very isolating” chapter of life, she mentioned.
Lawyers say that by making use of tax to sanitary gadgets, the Pakistani government has systemically uncared for ladies’s and ladies’ rights to health and schooling – impeding their skill to totally take part in public life – and violated Article 25 of the Constitution, which prohibits discrimination on the foundation of intercourse.
Under the Sales Tax Act of 1990, an 18% gross sales tax was imposed on regionally made sanitary pads and a 25% customs tax on imported menstrual gadgets, in accordance to the authorized petition printed by Omer and Khan in October.
That extra cost, coupled with different native taxes, means ladies in Pakistan face a 40% surcharge on interval merchandise, in accordance to UNICEF, pricing out the most weak.
As of mid-2025, practically 45% of the nation’s inhabitants have been dwelling beneath the World Bank’s world decrease middle-income poverty line of $4.20 (about 1,175 Pakistani rupees) per day, it reported last year.
Essential items pressure meager family budgets, with shoppers paying round 363 Pakistani rupees for a dozen eggs or 2,186 Pakistan rupees for a kilogram of wheat flour, in accordance to financial knowledge agency CEIC Data, citing 2025 figures from the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics.
Meanwhile, a pack of 10 industrial sanitary pads prices between 400 and 485 Pakistani rupees, on common – or $1.43 to $1.73 – and may not be sufficient to final one girl or woman for a month.
Failures to implement the legal guidelines meant to shield ladies are bolstered by the taboos round menstruation, mentioned Omer, which restrict public dialogue.
A court in Islamabad ordered the government to give a “timely response” to the attorneys’ arguments so the case may proceed, following a listening to in late November, Omer mentioned.
In the interim, Omer hopes the government will take her case critically. “With a tax like this, each day the price of injustice is experienced by half the population,” she instructed NCS final week.
After she began menstruating, Mahnoor, the reproductive rights activist, mentioned she felt like a stranger in her personal physique – an expertise all too frequent for women in Pakistan, in accordance to one health employee, who cited a dearth of instructional sources about the bodily modifications that accompany puberty.
“When periods come, girls think they’re getting cancer,” mentioned Dr. Azra Ahsan, a gynaecologist primarily based in the port metropolis of Karachi. “They think they’re dying, until they talk to someone.”
In a society the place males are sometimes the breadwinners and deal with family funds – and menstrual merchandise are unaffordable for a lot of – ladies’s health care wants have a tendency to fall by the wayside, Ahsan mentioned.
Those who strive to ship sexual health schooling are ostracized and discouraged, the physician instructed NCS.
The data hole exists throughout revenue and schooling ranges, mentioned Ahsan, serving to misinformation to proliferate. A lack of entry to bathrooms, working water or menstrual gadgets in public areas forces many women and girls to exclude themselves from public life. One in 5 ladies in Pakistan miss college due to their menstrual cycle, UNICEF said in a 2024 report, “main to the lack of at the least a 12 months’s price of schooling.”
Some college students keep away from strolling to class if they’ve a stain on their garments as a result of they can’t entry sanitary pads, mentioned Mahnoor. Her personal class instructor skipped the textbook part on durations, she added, which to her implied that “you’re not allowed to know and learn about your bodies.”
On one event, she recalled, one other feminine instructor despatched a pupil house as a result of her interval had began, instructing her to stand at the finish of a classroom till her mother and father may come to accumulate her. “She had to take notes and write and do all the work standing just because she was bleeding,” Mahnoor added. “It was really cruel.”
The college had no provides of sanitary gadgets to supply the woman, she defined. “If she sat, there might be a stain might be left on her clothes, which was something more shameful to deal with.”
The challenges round menstruation don’t finish with college. Employers don’t all the time supply rest room breaks, that means some ladies, significantly garment employees, don’t have time to rise up from their workstation and alter their sanitary pad, added Mahnoor.
Over the previous couple of years, seasonal flash floods, exacerbated by the local weather disaster, have trapped ladies in Pakistan in an “awful, awful cycle” of interval poverty, mentioned Omer, the lawyer.
For folks navigating their interval in flood reduction camps, the actuality could be “painful,” in accordance to Mahnoor, who co-founded the non-profit Mahwari Justice in 2022, and has distributed sanitary merchandise to folks in flood-stricken zones.
Women have little selection however to wash their rags in floodwater, the activist instructed NCS, including that they will not be in a position to dry them if there is no solar. Some are pressured to use their scarf as a makeshift pad. Others resort to “free bleeding,” or fold mud and sand into their rags to add absorbency, she mentioned – rising the danger of chafing, pores and skin illnesses, urinary tract infections and vaginal infections.
If a lady or a lady needs to relieve herself in a secluded space for privateness, she could also be in danger from “people who are going to prey on her,” added Mahnoor.
Beyond the bodily health dangers, docs and attorneys warn the societal disgrace round menstruation has a corrosive affect on ladies’s psychological wellbeing and sense of self. Some non secular communities bar menstruating ladies from frequent dwelling areas, mentioned Ahsan.
As a end result, ladies and particularly ladies really feel they’re being “punished for bleeding,” Mahnoor mentioned, including that males who keep silent on the subject are complicit.
As the case strikes ahead, Omer mentioned she and Khan had been “pleasantly surprised” by the “encouraging” response from broad swaths of society, together with nationwide media shops.
The two attorneys hope it will immediate discussions about reproductive rights, puberty and sexual health throughout Pakistani society, significantly for these now of their teenagers and 20s. “It’s time to go beyond just protesting. It’s time to actually start challenging what we can (do)… through legal reform and through advocacy and through lobbying in the right circles,” Omer mentioned.
“With the newer generations coming in, people are speaking up a bit more on previously taboo topics,” she added. “They are very outspoken.”