Why 25-year-old Mahnoor Omer took Pakistan to courtroom over intervals | Gender Fairness

Rising up in Rawalpindi, a metropolis adjoining to Pakistan’s capital Islamabad, Mahnoor Omer remembers the disgrace and nervousness she felt at school when she had intervals. Going to the bathroom with a sanitary pad was an act of stealth, like attempting to cowl up a criminal offense.

“I used to cover my pad up my sleeve like I used to be taking narcotics to the toilet,” says Omer, who comes from a middle-class household – her father a businessman and her mom a homemaker. “If somebody talked about it, academics would put you down.” A classmate as soon as advised her that her mom thought-about pads “a waste of cash”.

“That’s when it hit me,” says Omer. “If middle-class households suppose this fashion, think about how out of attain these merchandise are for others.”

Now 25, Omer has gone from cautious schoolgirl to nationwide centrestage in a battle that might reshape menstrual hygiene in Pakistan, a rustic the place critics say economics is compounding social stigma to punish girls – merely for being girls.

In September, Omer, a lawyer, petitioned the Lahore Excessive Court docket, difficult what she and lots of others say is successfully a “interval tax” imposed by Pakistan on its greater than 100 million girls.

Pakistani governments have, underneath the Sales Tax Act of 1990, lengthy charged an 18 p.c gross sales tax on domestically manufactured sanitary pads and a customs tax of 25 p.c on imported ones, in addition to on uncooked supplies wanted to make them. Add on different native taxes, and UNICEF Pakistan says that these pads are sometimes successfully taxed at about 40 percent.

Omer’s petition argues that these taxes – which particularly have an effect on girls – are discriminatory, and violate a collection of constitutional provisions that assure equality and dignity, elimination of exploitation and the promotion of social justice.

In a rustic the place menstruation is already a taboo topic in most households, Omer and different attorneys and activists supporting the petition say that the taxes make it even tougher for many Pakistani girls to entry sanitary merchandise. A regular pack of commercially branded sanitary pads in Pakistan at present prices about 450 rupees ($1.60) for 10 items. In a rustic with a per capita earnings of $120 a month, that’s the price of a meal of rotis and dal for a low-income household of 4. Reduce the price by 40 p.c – the taxes – and the calculations change into much less loaded in opposition to sanitary pads.

In the mean time, solely 12 p.c of Pakistani girls use commercially produced sanitary pads, based on a 2024 research by UNICEF and the WaterAid nonprofit. The remaining improvise utilizing material or different supplies, and sometimes don’t even have entry to wash water to scrub themselves.

“If this petition goes ahead, it’s going to make pads reasonably priced,” says Hira Amjad, the founder and govt director of Dastak Basis, a Pakistani nonprofit whose work is targeted on selling gender equality and combating violence in opposition to girls.

And that, say attorneys and activists, might function a spark for broader social change.

The courtroom docket describes the case as Mahnoor Omer in opposition to senior officers of the federal government of Pakistan. However that’s not what it feels wish to Omer.

“It seems like girls versus Pakistan.”

‘It’s not shameful’

Bushra Mahnoor, founding father of Mahwari Justice, a Pakistani student-led organisation whose identify interprets to “menstrual justice”, realised early simply how a lot of a wrestle it may very well be to entry sanitary pads.

Mahnoor – no relation to Omer – grew up in Attock, a metropolis within the northwestern a part of Pakistan’s Punjab province, with 4 sisters. “Each month, I needed to examine if there have been sufficient pads. If my interval got here when considered one of my sisters had hers too,” discovering a pad was a problem, she says.

The wrestle continued at school, the place, as was the case with Omer, intervals had been related to disgrace. A trainer as soon as made considered one of her classmates stand for 2 complete lectures as a result of her white uniform was stained. “That was dehumanising,” she says.

Mahnoor was 10 when she had her first interval. “I didn’t know learn how to use a pad. I caught it the wrong way up; the sticky aspect touched my pores and skin. It was painful. Nobody tells you learn how to handle it.”

She says that disgrace was by no means hers alone, nevertheless it’s a part of a silence which begins at residence and accompanies women into maturity. A research on menstrual health in Pakistan exhibits that eight out of 10 women really feel embarrassed or uncomfortable when speaking about intervals, and two out of three women report by no means having acquired details about menstruation earlier than it started. The findings, printed within the Frontiers in Public Well being journal in 2023, hyperlink this silence to poor hygiene, social exclusion and missed college days.

In 2022, when floods devastated Pakistan, Mahnoor started Mahwari Justice to make sure that reduction camps didn’t overlook the menstrual wants of girls. “We started distributing pads and later realised there’s a lot extra to be performed,” she says. Her organisation has distributed greater than 100,000 interval kits – every containing pads, cleaning soap, underwear, detergent and painkillers – and created rap songs and comics to normalise conversations about menstruation. “While you say the phrase ‘mahwari’ out loud, you’re educating folks it’s not shameful,” she says. “It’s simply life.”

The identical floods additionally influenced Amjad, the Dastak Basis founder, although her nonprofit has been round for a decade now. Its work now additionally consists of distributing interval kits throughout pure disasters.

However the social stigma related to menstruation can also be intently tied to economics within the methods during which its affect performs out for Pakistani girls, suggests Amjad.

“In most households, it’s the boys who make monetary selections,” she says. “Even when the lady is bringing the cash, she’s giving it to the person, and he’s deciding the place that cash must go.”

And if the price of girls’s well being feels too excessive, that’s usually compromised. “[With] the inflated costs as a result of tax, there isn’t a dialog in many homes about whether or not we must always purchase pads,” she says. “It’s an expense they can not afford organically.”

Based on the 2023 research within the Frontiers in Public Health, over half of Pakistani girls usually are not capable of afford sanitary pads.

If the taxes are eliminated, and menstrual hygiene turns into extra reasonably priced, the advantages will lengthen past well being, says Amjad.

Faculty attendance charges for ladies might enhance, she stated. At the moment, greater than half of Pakistan’s women within the 5 to 16 age group usually are not at school, according to the United Nations. “We may have stress-free girls. We may have happier and more healthy girls.”

‘Feeling of justice’

Omer says her curiosity in girls’s and minority rights started early. “What impressed me was simply seeing the blatant mistreatment on daily basis,” she says. “The financial, bodily, and verbal exploitation that girls face, whether or not it’s on the streets, within the media, or inside houses, by no means sat proper with me.”

She credit her mom for making her develop as much as be an empathetic and understanding individual.

After finishing college, she labored as a gender and legal justice guide at Crossroads Consultants, a Pakistan-based agency that collaborates with NGOs and growth companions on gender and legal justice reform. On the age of 19, she additionally volunteered at Aurat March, an annual girls’s rights motion and protest held throughout Pakistan on Worldwide Girls’s Day – it’s a dedication she has saved up since then.

Her first step into activism got here at 16, when she and her pals began placing collectively “dignity kits”, small care packages for ladies in low-income neighbourhoods of Islamabad. “We’d increase funds with bake gross sales or use our personal cash,” she recollects.

The cash she was capable of increase enabled her to distribute about 300 dignity kits that she and her pals made themselves. They every contained pads, underwear, ache remedy and wipes. However she wished to do extra.

She bought an opportunity when she began working on the Supreme Court docket in early 2025, first as a regulation clerk. She’s at present pursuing postgraduate research in gender, peace and safety on the London Faculty of Economics and says that she is going to return to Pakistan to renew her follow after she graduates.

She grew to become pals with fellow lawyer Ahsan Jehangir Khan, who specialises in taxation and constitutional regulation. The plan to problem the “interval tax” emerged from their conversations.

“He pushed me to file this petition and attempt to get justice as an alternative of simply sitting round.”

Khan, who’s a co-petitioner within the case, says that preventing the taxes is about greater than accessibility and affordability of sanitary pads – it’s about justice. “It’s a tax on a organic perform,” he says.

Tax insurance policies in Pakistan, he says, are written by “a privileged elite, largely males who’ve by no means had to consider what this tax means for odd girls”. The structure, he provides, “could be very clear that you simply can not have something discriminatory in opposition to any gender in any way”.

To Amjad, the Dastak Basis founder, the struggle for menstrual hygiene is intently tied to her different ardour – the wrestle in opposition to local weather change. The acute weather-related disaster, corresponding to floods, that Pakistan has confronted in latest instances, she says, hit girls notably laborious.

She remembers the trauma many ladies she labored with after the 2022 floods described to her. “Think about that you’re dwelling in a tent and you’ve got mahwari [menstruation] for the primary time,” she says. “You aren’t mentally ready for it. You’re working on your life. You don’t have entry to security or safety. That trauma is a trauma for all times.”

As temperatures rise on common, girls might want to change sanitary pads extra continuously throughout their intervals – and a scarcity of sufficient entry will show a good greater drawback, Amjad warns. She helps the withdrawal of taxes on sanitary pads – however solely these constituted of cotton, not plastic ones that “take 1000’s of years to decompose”.

Amjad can also be campaigning for paid menstruation go away. “I’ve come throughout girls who had been fired as a result of they’d ache during times and couldn’t work,” she says. “If you find yourself menstruating, one a part of your mind is on menstruation. You may’t actually focus correctly.”

In the meantime, opponents of the taxes are hoping that Omer’s petition will stress the Pakistani authorities to observe different nations corresponding to India, Nepal and the United Kingdom which have abolished their interval taxes.

Taking up that mantle in opposition to the federal government’s insurance policies didn’t come simply to Omer. Her dad and mom, she says, had been nervous at first about their daughter going to courtroom in opposition to the federal government. “They stated it’s by no means a good suggestion to tackle the state,” she says.

Now, they’re happy with her, she says. “They perceive why this issues.”

To her, the case is not only a authorized struggle. “Once I consider this case, the image that involves thoughts … It’s not a courtroom, it’s a sense of justice,” she says. “It makes me really feel a way of pleasure to have the ability to do that and take this step with out worry.”