In most states menstrual products are not sales tax-exempt, a category primarily reserved for food, prescription medications, and other “necessities of life.”
When it comes to reproductive health, there aren’t many issues on which the two of us—a heartland conservative and a pro-choice New Yorker—find common ground. Yet one policy priority has enabled us to skirt partisan rancor: periods.
We contend—and have gained the backing of the American Medical Association, legal scholars, and hundreds of thousands of petition-signers—that this classification creates an unfair and discriminatory levy. GOP strategist and political commentator Evan Siegfried helped cement conservative enthusiasm in the first days of the Trump presidency. In a post-inauguration New York Times op-ed entitled, “What Republicans Have to Learn from the Women’s March,” he specifically called out the tampon tax as an easy lift for Republican-controlled statehouses and a way to combat “the falsehood that the party is engaged in a ‘war on women.
Unlike the sales tax exemption, this bill is an unfunded mandate, the type that is routinely rejected by Republicans. Yet when debated on the floor of the Illinois House in 2017, not a single party member rose in opposition—highly unusual in that statehouse, and a signal of progress. The vote wasn’t near-unanimous like the tampon tax, but both parties rallied support. Notably, it was signed by a Republican governor, as well.The experience of incarcerated women also stokes conservative appeal.
Also important has been the deliberate framing of proposed interventions in the language of equity—“menstrual equity,” to be precise. Equity-based arguments offer a more neutral articulation of principles of gender parity, economic fairness, and educational opportunity, as opposed to demands for entitlements or murkier claims of rights.
In Illinois, this has played out in potentially historic ways. Many Republicans who voted in favor of menstrual policies in 2016-17 went on to support the state’s 2018 vote to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, a key advance in the national movement to enshrine gender equality in the U.S. Constitution. The same is true for efforts to advance proposed improvements to the state’s Equal Pay Act.
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