Ohio correctional facilities will soon be required to provide incarcerated women with an adequate supply of free period products, thanks to a new state law.
House Bill 29 takes effect on March 20.
Dianira Garcia is one of the women who testified in support of the bill, after being denied help and extra pads while in prison.
“That's like the most basic need in the world, especially in a woman's institution," she said.
One woman’s personal experience
When Garcia was incarcerated about a decade ago at the Ohio Reformatory for Women and the Dayton Correctional Institution, she was issued 18 pads a month.
“And that was it,” she said. “If you needed extra, you would have to ask staff. And if you even asked staff, 90% of the time, they didn't have it or it was locked up.”
Without an adequate supply of menstrual products, she remembered bleeding through her clothes.
“I feared being humiliated if I bled through my two or three state-issued outfits,” she wrote in her testimony. “I would have severe anxiety and depression during my cycle due to the embarrassment.”
She said some women used homemade tampons to make do and many developed toxic shock syndrome as a result.
Toward the end of her incarceration, Garcia’s health took a turn for the worse.
“I started experiencing really, really heavy periods,” she said. “I'm looking at 10, 15, 20, 30 days and I'm just bleeding and I am telling them something is not right.”
She said it was difficult to get in to see the OB-GYN while in prison, and that when she did, they dismissed her concerns.
After she was released, she found out she had stage 3 uterine cancer.
She hopes House Bill 29 will ensure women currently in prison have the health products they need.
“I'm hoping that these women are able to get safe, free access to the things that they need and then to just be okay,” she said. “And not have to suffer the humiliation and the degradation …just because of something that our bodies naturally do that we cannot absolutely control.”
Ohio’s new law
Federally run prisons started offering free period products to incarcerated people in 2017. And about half of states now have laws requiring state correctional facilities to do the same.
Kayelin Tiggs, who helped write House Bill 29, says Ohio’s law goes a step further.
“It is the first anti-discrimination bill in the United States that prevents the withholding and denial of menstrual products as a form of punishment or as a form of discrimination,” she said.
It’s also unique in that it requires facilities to offer disposal containers for used menstrual products and to give incarcerated women at least one shower each day of their period.
“A majority of these women will be released back into society one day,” Tiggs said. “And it's in no one's best interest to continue to deny women their basic human rights and deprive them of their dignity, and then expect them to go back into society and be productive, healthy, happy citizens.”
