When the Left Gets It So Wrong That They're Right?

In an alternative universe, public toilets are provided, but toilet paper is not. Individuals are expected to carry their own toilet paper around with them, and they simply dispose of it in the toilet once it is used. Obviously, you're not walking around with a roll of toilet paper in your pocket, but wet wipes like One Wipe Charlies are currently available in packaging which approximates the size of a menstrual pad.

Now, why is this universe so disgusting? We're aware that if people don't bring their materials, they are bringing LITERAL SHIT out in to the world. Nobody needs that. It's also an obvious health hazard: feces spread E. coli bacteria among others, and nobody wants to live in a world where they're subjected to health hazards on a daily basis. *cue photo montage of San Francisco*

Now some might ask in this alternative universe, "But what about personal responsibility? It's not hard to have a small packet of wipes in your wallet, and adults are expected to remember their wallet when they leave the house. It's not anything extra." However, regardless of whether fully grown adults SHOULD be able to be responsible enough to carry a single packet on them, some adults make poor decisions.

Do I think that I should be responsible for the bad decisions of others? No (and this is the principle leading conservatives to reject the push for menstrual products in public restrooms). We shouldn't pay for someone else's forgetfulness. I'll consider this with menstrual blood in the section below, but in the context of this example it's pretty obvious that we're paying for that bad decision both ways. If I pay for it up front then I don't have to deal with encountering fecal matter in the public square and have preserved my health as a result. If I don't pay for it up front, then I pay for it on the back end when I get sick from exposure to human feces.

So, we as a society have free public toilets because it's a benefit to us generally; this is our preferred form of payment for something we really shouldn't have to pay for but which we aren't able to NOT pay for.

Consider the Present Universe

Now, why did I ask you to consider this alternative universe? Hopefully it should be pretty obvious at this point: I think that fecal waste and menstrual waste are comparable, and that we should therefore provide for management of menstrual blood for the same reasons as the feces example I described above.

First, are the products portable? Yes, but they're equally portable to wet wipes that adults could just as easily be expected to carry in my alternative universe. The portability of the product doesn't negate my point here.

Second, is this universe disgusting? Maybe most people don't think this is disgusting, but I'm fairly certain that's just because can't see it. Blood stains just look like "suspicious dark spots," which could be due to feces, urine, or a number of things. I really think people actually look past this stuff when they see it around them and so we fail to identify the real public health hazards posed by having menstrual blood on public surfaces. Now, where's the evidence that there IS blood on public surfaces?

1.First page google search indicated a MYRIAD OR ARTICLES FEATURING PERSONAL ACCOUNTS OF HOW WOMEN TRIED TO HIDE THE FACT THAT THEY WERE BLEEDING ON PUBLIC SURFACES. Blood is a common feature of your seats in shared spaces. I hope nobody's wearing short shorts. If you can't tell, I'm mad about how many results I found, and how... find and encouraging people were that this wasn't bad. This is a public health problem. Being unprepared or unable to find a private location to deal with things does not make you a morally bad person, but the situation itself shouldn't be minimized.
2. A review of the literature doesn't reveal much in the way of studies for blood on public transportation seats. *SHOCKER* I might advocate for doing some of these, just to show how widespread the problem is quantitatively since we have the qualitative anecdotes to warrant such an investigation. However, I did find one fun study: From 1999-2003 a study looked at the hygiene of 1061 environmental surfaces from children's play equipment to office environments and personal items. (26/801) evaluated specifically had blood on them. Now that wasn't much, but they didn't do an analysis of the most widely-reported environment where we would see menstrual blood on seats: public transportation.(1)
3. The CDC specifically identifies maintenance and waste workers as being at risk for contracting a bloodborne disease through exposure.(2) Additionally, the ISSA identifies personnel who deal with blood-stained laundry as being at risk for contracting bloodorne diseases.(3) It is most likely that this would be Hepatitis B, seem to lose much of their potency based on exposure to air, but HepB is still a concern.
Based on the data at my disposal, I can't say how much blood is being tracked onto public surfaces, and if I had to identify a weakness in my position it would be here. However, I don't think the existence of a small problem is reason enough to dismiss it, especially when the scope of the problem and solution are similar to services already provided by the government.

Of course, we still need to identify whether menstrual blood is in fact a public health hazard, and the data here is much more widely available. Here's what menstrual blood can transmit:
1. Staph/step: These cause toxic shock syndrome when they come into contact with someone's full body circulation. (This is why women can die from keeping a tampon in for too long, if you've wondered and felt uncomfortable about asking.) However, these bacteria also cause impetigo (surface-level bacterial skin infection usually but not always caused by ) as well as deeper skin infections (symptoms look like giant boils or smaller but very painful pimples). And those infections simply require contact between a dermal abrasion and the bacteria. Yum. 
2. HCV: Evidence of HCV in vaginal secretions, including menstrual blood. Hepatitis C, which costs tens of thousands of dollars to cure.(4)
3. HIV: Evidence of HIV in vaginal secretions, including menstrual blood.(5) The source I have looks at a different aspect of those secretions, but regardless, they're present throughout the month and they exit the body through menstrual secretions.
4. HBV: Evidence of HBV surface antigen in sexual secretions and menstrual blood of those affected. HBVAsG is NOT evidence of HBV. HOWEVER, the purpose of this study was to determine whether HBVAsG can spread HBV, and this study concludes that HBVAsG is a likely route of transmission because it was found in CARRIERS of HBV.(6) So this may be a disease which is also transmittable via menstrual blood.
Which of these are realistically health risks? Based on incidence rates vs. exposure rates, it looks like HBV and bacterial infections are the serious threats. It's fortunate that the more serious conditions (HIV and HCV) are more difficult to transmit.(7) However, if we are happy to protect ourselves against fecal-borne illnesses which are usually identified as acute gastrointestinal illnesses, I think HBV and bacterial infection are sufficiently serious to warrant the same sort of protection. 

"But Ellis, is there even evidence that exposure to menstrual blood is positively correlated with infection?"
1. Studies of rural populations where proper menstrual sanitary care is either culturally taboo, culturally uncommon, or financially unfeasible have found that poor menstrual hygiene management leads to bacterial infections.(8, 9, 10) i.e. being in contact with fluid which has bacteria in it gives you bacterial infections, because duh. The reason why women get toxic shock after wearing a tampon for too long is because tampons trap vaginal bacteria in the inside of the body and cause septic shock. (I don't mean to imply that tampons are entirely unsafe, but if used incorrectly we can see what happens when someone's circulation is subjected to the bacteria which are present in menstrual blood. The infection would be less severe from a dermal point of contact (obviously), but we're clearly dealing with bio-hazardous material here.
2. Specific example showing that exposure to the bacteria found in samples of menstrual blood is pathogenic: "Women who used reusable absorbent pads were more likely to have symptoms of urogenital infection (AdjOR=2.3, 95%CI1.5-3.4) or to be diagnosed with at least one urogenital infection (BV or UTI) (AdjOR=2.8, 95%CI1.7-4.5), than women using disposable pads."(11) Again, being in contact with discarded menstrual blood is hazardous to human health. 
3. While the women using reusable pads got more infections, it was because they were coming back into contact with their own menstrual blood, not that the disposable pads were magically free of health hazardous bacteria.
4. For a more microbiological study: multiple strains of S. aureus were identified on tampons from multiple women.(12) Menstrual waste contains pathogens, plain and simple.

Based on this information, it looks like the presence of menstrual blood on public surfaces presents a health risk to the public. The diseases are generally MORE severe than what we would find in most fecal-borne diseases, but I will concede that the incidence is not high based on the quantitative data at my disposal. (If you know of any assessments of the presence of blood on public transportation seats I would be grateful if you'd point me to it.) Regardless of why a particular woman may or may not be prepared, we should provide menstrual pads in women's restrooms for the benefit of the public at large. For situations where we either pay for someone's poor decisions with our money or our health, we should be consistent and choose health in this instance like we have in similar situations.

Furthermore, OSHA actually identifies menstrual products as a mitigating factor against the spread of diseases associated with menstrual waste: 
"OSHA does not generally consider discarded feminine hygiene products, used to absorb menstrual flow, to fall within the definition of regulated waste. The intended function of products such as sanitary napkins is to absorb and contain blood. The absorbent material of which they are composed would, under most circumstances, prevent the release of liquid or semi-liquid blood or the flaking off of dried blood. OSHA expects these products to be discarded into waste containers which are properly lined with plastic or wax paper bags. Such bags should protect the employees from physical contact with the contents. At the same time, it is the employer's responsibility to determine the existence of regulated waste. This determination is not based on actual volume of blood, but rather on the potential to release blood (e.g., when compacted in a waste container)."(13)
They write that the existence of menstrual products and their absorption of menstrual waste is why we don't need to treat menstrual waste as seriously as we do blood splatters. OSHA specifically calls menstrual blood hazardous... because it is, as evidenced by my past four points. If menstrual blood is a sufficient hazard to potentially require OSHA to step in, I'd put it in the same category as feces.

So, we an have indication form the government that that the government sees menstrual waste as hazardous AND that they see menstrual products as a way to manage that hazard AND we already manage hazardous waste via sanitation services provided by the government. If the government aims to provide a sanitation service, it's failing on own terms.

Conclusions

The public health risks posed by menstrual waste are sufficient to merit the same governmental action as is taken for the management of similar bio hazardous materials like fecal waste.  For those who object on the grounds that we are Independent Women Who Don't Need No Man(TM), and that we can tan take care of ourselves, I agree. But that objection is irrelevant to the argument in favor of providing menstrual pads in public restrooms. (Quite frankly, many of us would provide for our own needs with the knowledge that public restroom pads would likely have the approximate texture of public restroom toilet paper.)

This is not an argument about how women deserve something extra in society. Feminists who begin and end their argument with equity claims about what women need are literally shooting us all in the foot. Essentially, the differences between my reasoning and the Left's reasoning come down to this: the Left has reconstituted this service as a right (this is unfortunately not a unique example). This reclassification has enough frightening implications to fill five articles at least, but the most relevant to the scope of this post is the implication that women deserve something extra by virtue of their being women in society. This is why conservatives deride this policy proposal as infantalizing: it IS infantalizing to assume that I need things from people by the mere fact of my existence. It's also entirely contrary to the principles upon which this country was founded.

This is also not an argument requiring that the government expand its services. The reason for public sector sanitation services in the United States was to prevent communicable disease outbreaks, not to provide equal-opportunity poop management services.(12) (Furthermore, the Left's argument seems to be based on a desire for equity-based redistribution of hygiene-related resources, which sounds like a shitty version of communism, pun intended.) I am simply arguing that the government provides the services it promises. If the government intends to mess around in a certain industry such that the market is no longer profitable for private companies, it should AT THE VERY LEAST do its job. As it stands, the government accounts for 2/3 of bodily fluid management and only fecal-borne sanitation-related illnesses.

The government, and the federal government in particular, is continually searching for inroads into the private sector because of a supposed ability to provide better for us than a company or individuals can. Frankly, the government should live up to its opinion of itself before asking anything more of us. I am tired of seeing yet another example of government incompetence à la U.S. Postal Service.

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