From 2023, women and girls living in poverty should be able to receive free menstrual products. On Tuesday, a majority of the House of Representatives voted in favor of a motion submitted by D66, Volt and PvdA. Providing free products should tackle menstrual poverty in the Netherlands.
D66 Member of Parliament Hülya Kat registers a press release that girls and women with low incomes can collect menstrual products from the new year at distribution points of aid organizations ‘such as the Food Bank, the Poverty Fund or the Red Cross’. Such distribution points already exist in the Netherlands, but will be scaled up by the Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment.
Almost one in ten girls and women indicate that they sometimes have too little money for sanitary towels or tampons. That appears from research of development cooperation organization Plan International. If response in response to this study, the cabinet announced in 2019 that it had already taken “various measures” to structurally tackle poverty. According to then minister Bruno Bruins (Medical Care, VVD), this approach was “enough to combat menstrual poverty and its consequences”.
This summer, menstrual products in Scotland became free in public places: all public institutions must offer the products for free. Scotland is the first country to offer these products for free.
Read also: In the UK, free tampons are mainly a sign of failing poverty policies