Like what you just read? You’ve got great taste. Subscribe to Jezebel, and for $5 a month or $50 a year, you’ll get access to a bunch of subscriber benefits, including getting to read the next article (and all the ones after that) ad-free. Plus, you’ll be supporting independent journalism—which, can you even imagine not supporting independent journalism in times like these? Yikes.
2 Kentucky Women Are Taking the State’s Tampon Tax to Court
Here’s your infuriating, albeit maybe unsurprising, fact of the day: in almost all 50 states (bar Illinois), Viagra is completely untaxed; and in 18 others, the tampon tax can go as high as 7%. Because there’s no essential product quite like the one that lets our nation’s gerontocrats get it up!
But because period products are—indeed—essential, two Kentucky women this month filed a lawsuit against the state’s 6% tax, saying it’s a form of discrimination against women on the basis of sex, and a blatant violation of the state and U.S. constitutions’ Equal Protection Clause.
“Kentucky has made a deliberate choice to exempt from sales tax the products that people need because of how their bodies work,” the lawsuit, which was filed on March 9 and initially reported by the Kentucky Lantern, reads. “The legislature understood that taxing products needed for biological reasons is wrong, but nonetheless disregarded this biological need of women. While a man in Kentucky can buy Viagra tax-free, a woman cannot buy a tampon or menstrual pad without being taxed.”
The lawsuit is being coordinated by Period Law, whose founder and executive director, Laura Strausfeld, has been working on a litigative campaign to end the “tampon tax” for a decade, as the FDA classifies tampons and pads as medical devices, and the American Medical Association deems them “essential for women’s health.” The organization’s first major lawsuit, which was filed as a class-action suit in New York in 2016, led to the end of the state’s decades-long period tax.
“Ultimately, the tampon tax is unconstitutional,” Strausfield recently wrote in a guest article for the Courier Journal. “The women of Kentucky deserve to be treated fairly in our tax code, just as they are in 23 other states.”
According to the Lantern, the two women filed the lawsuit because they both live with menstrual disorders, one with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), and the other with premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD). The woman with PCOS told the outlet that she spends as much as $50 per month on pads or tampons, as PCOS makes her period last anywhere from nine to fourteen days.
On top of all this, the average cost of a standard box of 40 tampons can cost between $8 to $11.50—a price that’s shot up 36% in the last five years. Per numbers obtained by a science journal in 2021, Americans who need period products spend about $6,000 on them throughout their life—an estimate that does not account for tax.
Currently, Kentucky lawmakers are considering HB 95, a bipartisan bill that would mandate public schools to stock their bathrooms with free menstrual products for grades 6 through 12. (The same kind of legislation that earned Tim Kaine the moniker “Tampon Tim” in 2024.) It was filed by State Rep. Lisa Willner (D-Louisville)—who’s been trying to un-tax the state’s period products since 2023, when she filed a bill to make them tax-exempt. A similar bill was filed by State Rep. Kim Banta (R-Fort Mitchell) in 2024.
At the same time, however, Kentucky is also the home to some of the most regressive reproductive rights policies in the country, with a near-total abortion ban, police who ignore state laws to arrest women for allegedly self-managing their abortions, and whose GOP lawmakers have performed real dirty tricks to further tighten access to abortion. And where, again, Viagra is not taxed, at all.