For roughly 40 years of my life, I needed to use menstrual hygiene products. I bought and paid for them out of my own pocket — or my mother did during the early years — but I certainly never dreamed that I had a “right” to demand that taxpayers pay for my pads and tampons..Had anyone suggested that I was an impoverished, deprived girl who couldn’t fully participate in school, work or social activity during the four or five days per month when I had my period, I would have fiercely resented them and told them to mind their own damned business..But the federal Department of Labour has now prepared draft regulations that will require federally regulated employers (including banks, railways, airlines and TV stations) to provide “clean and hygienic tampons and menstrual pads” in all “toilet rooms” regardless of their marked gender — which appears to mean that these “free” products will be in men’s washrooms too..Citizens can still comment on these proposals online until November 13, so please, go to it. .It’s estimated this will cost taxpayers roughly $11.6 million per year. Even though it’s a relatively small amount, I’m livid about this. After 40 years of paying for my own products, I’m now expected to fork over additional tax money to pay for somebody else’s — and all those somebodies are people who have jobs and have no excuse for not paying for their own sanitary needs, just as they pay for their own food, clothing, shelter, phones, cosmetics, tattoos, transportation and entertainment..The draft regulations contain a bunch of hooey about “psychological health risks, such as anxiety and stress caused by stigma around menstruation.” Suck it up, ladies. You’re no different than women decades or centuries ago. Half the population of the planet has gotten through this monthly inconvenience from time immemorial without having regular nervous breakdowns because they were menstruating..Then there’s more hooey about protecting the physical health and safety of menstruating employees. This could be handled in one sentence: “Ladies, change your tampons often enough to prevent toxic shock, and keep a supply in your purse or desk so you’ll be ready every month and won’t get blood stains on your clothes.”.There, it’s done..What really bugs me about this proposal and similar ones, such as provincial or local initiatives to supply menstrual products in high schools, is the suggestion access to “free” menstrual products is some kind of human right. Advocates of these programs need to go back to philosophy class and study the distinction between negative rights and positive rights..The only things that can legitimately be called rights are things that impose on other people nothing more than the obligation to restrain themselves. Your right to life means that I have an obligation to restrain myself from killing or maiming you, and vice-versa. Negative rights are reciprocal. But your right to life does not include an obligation on my part to provide you with all the material goods you think you need to sustain yourself..If your “rights” imposed such positive obligations on me, then you would in effect own me, and all my assets, which would leave me with no reciprocal right to life..Even the Supreme Court of Canada, dense as it can sometimes be, resisted the temptation to approve positive rights in a case called Gosselin v. Quebec, decided in 2002. (One has to wonder, though, whether they would do the same today.). Atlas ShruggedHank Reardon and Dagny Taggart, as portrayed by Jason Beghé and Samantha Mathis, in 'Atlas Shrugged.' (2012.) Writer Karen Selick proposes Ayn Rand's 'Atlas Shrugged' as a useful primer on how creeping socialism corrupts society. The right to tampons is just the beginning. .I think this “period poverty” baloney is the camel’s nose under the tent of efforts to introduce positive rights into Canadian law. Nobody wants to be the mean, stingy, Scrooge-like character who would deny such an inexpensive benefit to the “underprivileged” half of society. But once we grow accustomed to providing menstrual supplies to teenage girls as their “right,” then watch the demands roll in. Why wouldn’t they have an even stronger claim to more important necessities for their health and well-being, such as food and clothing? This is a quick trip down the road to full communism..If you want to read a really great work of art about how this sort of plan turns out in the end, read Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged..Meanwhile, would all the women who still have any common sense and self-respect left, please stand up and make their voices heard against these stupid proposals?
