Why 25-year-old Mahnoor Omer took Pakistan to court over periods | Gender Equity

Rising up in Rawalpindi, a metropolis adjoining to Pakistan’s capital Islamabad, Mahnoor Omer remembers the disgrace and anxiousness 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 lavatory,” 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 informed her that her mom thought of pads “a waste of cash”.

“That’s when it hit me,” says Omer. “If middle-class households assume this manner, 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 would reshape menstrual hygiene in Pakistan, a rustic the place critics say economics is compounding social stigma to punish ladies – merely for being ladies.

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 ladies.

Pakistani governments have, below 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 ladies – 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 legal professionals and activists supporting the petition say that the taxes make it even tougher for many Pakistani ladies to entry sanitary merchandise. A regular pack of commercially branded sanitary pads in Pakistan at the moment prices about 450 rupees ($1.60) for 10 items. In a rustic with a per capita revenue 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 turn out to be much less loaded in opposition to sanitary pads.

In the meanwhile, solely 12 p.c of Pakistani ladies use commercially produced sanitary pads, in accordance with a 2024 examine by UNICEF and the WaterAid nonprofit. The remainder improvise utilizing fabric or different supplies, and infrequently don’t even have entry to scrub water to clean themselves.

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

And that, say legal professionals and activists, may 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 appears like ladies versus Pakistan.”

‘It’s not shameful’

Bushra Mahnoor, founding father of Mahwari Justice, a Pakistani student-led organisation whose title interprets to “menstrual justice”, realised early simply how a lot of a battle it might 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 test if there have been sufficient pads. If my interval got here when one in all my sisters had hers too,” discovering a pad was a problem, she says.

The battle continued at school, the place, as was the case with Omer, intervals have been related to disgrace. A trainer as soon as made one in all her classmates stand for 2 total 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 the best way to use a pad. I caught it the wrong way up; the sticky facet touched my pores and skin. It was painful. Nobody tells you the best way to handle it.”

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

In 2022, when floods devastated Pakistan, Mahnoor started Mahwari Justice to make sure that aid 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 instructing individuals 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 contains distributing interval kits throughout pure disasters.

However the social stigma related to menstruation can also be carefully tied to economics within the methods wherein its influence performs out for Pakistani ladies, suggests Amjad.

“In most households, it’s the boys who make monetary choices,” 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 ladies’s well being feels too excessive, that’s typically compromised. “[With] the inflated costs as a result of tax, there isn’t any dialog in many homes about whether or not we should always purchase pads,” she says. “It’s an expense they can’t afford organically.”

Based on the 2023 examine within the Frontiers in Public Health, over half of Pakistani ladies should 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 may enhance, she stated. Presently, greater than half of Pakistan’s ladies within the 5 to 16 age group should not at school, according to the United Nations. “We could have stress-free ladies. We could have happier and more healthy ladies.”

‘Feeling of justice’

Omer says her curiosity in ladies’s and minority rights started early. “What impressed me was simply seeing the blatant mistreatment day-after-day,” she says. “The financial, bodily, and verbal exploitation that ladies 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 particular person.

After finishing faculty, she labored as a gender and legal justice guide at Crossroads Consultants, a Pakistan-based agency that collaborates with NGOs and improvement companions on gender and legal justice reform. On the age of 19, she additionally volunteered at Aurat March, an annual ladies’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 remembers.

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 treatment 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 legislation clerk. She’s at the moment pursuing postgraduate research in gender, peace and safety on the London Faculty of Economics and says that she’s going to return to Pakistan to renew her follow after she graduates.

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

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

Khan, who’s a co-petitioner within the case, says that combating 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 peculiar ladies”. The structure, he provides, “may be very clear that you simply can’t have something discriminatory in opposition to any gender in any respect”.

To Amjad, the Dastak Basis founder, the battle for menstrual hygiene is carefully tied to her different ardour – the battle in opposition to local weather change. The intense weather-related disaster, reminiscent of floods, that Pakistan has confronted in latest instances, she says, hit ladies significantly onerous.

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 might be operating in your life. You don’t have entry to security or safety. That trauma is a trauma for all times.”

As temperatures rise on common, ladies might want to change sanitary pads extra continuously throughout their intervals – and an absence of satisfactory entry will show an excellent 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 ladies who have been fired as a result of they’d ache during times and couldn’t work,” she says. “When you find yourself menstruating, one a part of your mind is on menstruation. You possibly can’t actually focus correctly.”

In the meantime, opponents of the taxes are hoping that Omer’s petition will strain the Pakistani authorities to observe different nations reminiscent of 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 mother and father, she says, have 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 pleased with her, she says. “They perceive why this issues.”

To her, the case isn’t just a authorized battle. “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 delight to have the ability to do that and take this step with out concern.”