May 28th is the first Menstrual Health Day that we as Moodies can experience. It feels a bit like a first birthday, but that will take a while 😉 .
The purpose of Menstrual Health Day 2022 is:
A world without menstrual poverty and without menstrual taboos in 2030.
So we still have 8 years to go, but we have to start NOW to achieve that.
Why is Menstrual Health Day necessary?
In recent weeks, a lot of attention has been paid to menstrual leave, partly because Spain has introduced this leave as a right for women who work and suffer from heavy periods. Opinions on this are divided.
On the one hand, it is good that attention is being paid to the group of women who suffer a lot from menstruation every month, so much trouble that they cannot work. And on the other hand, it's also a bit crazy. Can't we just view heavy periods as sick leave? Paula Kragten of Period Magazine even states that it worsens the position of women in the labor market. An employer who can choose between a person with the right to menstrual leave or a person without such leave is really more likely to choose the latter. She also believes that this should simply be considered absenteeism due to illness.
It is more important that research is conducted into why some women suffer so much every month, what causes this and how they can be helped.
doing research is important
In any case, it is urgent that more research is conducted into the functioning of the women's body, and the relationship between diseases and the hormones that build up/break down in each cycle, and how medicines work in each phase of the cycle. Fortunately, more and more attention is being paid to this in the media. Minister Kuipers finds it - bizarrely - not relevant to make extra money available for gender differences in health care. In March, Pointer devoted an episode to this that is really worth seeing. I was shocked. So plenty to do!
Menstrual poverty has also been in the news a lot in recent months. The increasing poverty in the world and even in the Netherlands does not help, of course. In 2019, PlanNL concluded in a study that approximately 1 in 9 girls/women in the Netherlands sometimes did not have enough money to buy menstrual products, so they stay at home and do not go to school or work. There are already quite a few initiatives in the Netherlands to help girls and women. We also donate Moodies pants to the Social Grocer (part of the Food Bank) to make a contribution, you can read more about this on our site . But of course this must be solved structurally.
And then the taboo. There are more and more programs about menstruation, there is more writing, there are podcasts. We are really well on our way,
but the subject of menstruation is still taboo. Boys still make fun of it and most girls find it 'embarrassing'. We still have a lot to do in the next 8 years towards 2030!
