Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs

Magazine. We are joined today by Congresswoman Grace Meng. She represents the 6th District of New York

in the United States Congress, and she recently reintroduced her legislation,

the menstrual equity for all act, which we are here to talk to her today about. Congresswoman,

thank you so much for joining us on current affairs. Thanks for having me.

Let's start by, if I could just ask you to familiarize our listeners and readers with the problem to which this legislation that you have

designed and introduced is an intended solution. Sure. Well, this is definitely not a new problem, but I think in recent years, it has garnered more

attention. And to be honest, growing up, I never thought about this as an issue. I was always

able to afford my period products. A seventh grader in my

district in Queens, New York actually wrote a letter to me one day and said that people in homeless

shelters were not able to get pads and tampons because of the way that the federal grants were structured.

And so that's how I learned about this problem. And as I delved more into it, I realized that this

wasn't just a problem affecting people, you know, in underdeveloped countries, but that many girls, for example,

in schools right here in America, skip school every month when they get their period because

they can't afford these products. And so that's how I started working on this issue.

You wrote in 2021, you co-authored article in Ms. Magazine explaining some of the problem.

And you really cite some just extraordinary and disturbing facts about the reality of what is

called period poverty in the United States.

You know, women choosing between buying food and spending money on menstrual

products. You know, you talked there about the homeless people improvising with, you say,

rags, paperbags, and newspapers. You described it as one of America's alarming and often hidden

inequities. Yeah, definitely.

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