Periods finally having a political moment
Virginia — where women’s bodies have long occupied the minds of lawmakers — wants the option of accessing your period app.
I mean, we’ve been asking you guys for years to be less squeamish about periods. But this is a bit much.
So much, in fact, that Democratic state lawmakers — scared that Virginia would go the way of Florida — were trying to pass legislation to prevent authorities from accessing the online calendars, which millions of American women use to track their menstrual cycles, when the administration of Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, butted in.
Youngkin may be in a simmering contest with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, also a Republican, for attention headed into 2024, but he didn’t need to bring our uteruses into it.
Yes, the period is finally having a political moment. But it’s not a great one.
“Currently any health information or any app information is available via search warrant,” Maggie Cleary, Virginia’s deputy secretary of public safety and homeland security, said after folks tried to get the state government to leave menstrual history alone. “And we believe that should continue be the case.”
Virginia’s state Sen. Barbara A. Favola, D-Arlington, saw where this was going. This is the state that proposed invasive, state-mandated, transvaginal ultrasounds to women considering abortions not long ago.
For a while, the Commonwealth basically had its very own Minister of Private Parts —former longtime Del. Bob Marshall, R-Prince William, whose legislative history was engorged with bills about sex, porn, bathrooms, STDs, gay soldiers, sex and more sex. (After being knocked out of office by America’s first transgender state legislator, Danica Roem, Marshall continues to spew pearl-clutching essays in Catholic media about sex.)
But the Youngkin administration is bringing the government back into your bathroom and bedroom.
Favola wanted to get ahead of this latest obsession with women’s reproductive cycles as soon as Youngkin proposed criminalizing abortions after 15 weeks.
She knows women become casualties in political gamesmanship. When one tanned, smiling alpha governor throws red meat to red voters, the other will follow. Within a week of each other, both states passed bills on hot-button, conservative measures censoring talk about gender identity and sexual orientation in public schools — the “don’t say gay” bill in Florida, and the, um,
“don’t say anything about anything that makes conservative parents uncomfortable” bill in Virginia. The states are tied for school districts with book bans — seven each. And, most telling of all, both governors were recently mocked by former president Donald Trump.
Once Florida dabbled with the idea of tracking girls’ periods, it would make sense that Virginia wouldn’t be far behind. Though Republicans insisted they’re not looking to prosecute women based on this data, Favola drafted the defensive bill.
“No search warrant shall be issued for the search and seizure of a computer, computer network, or other device containing electronic or digital information related to menstrual health data,” read Favola’s Senate Bill 852, which received significant, bipartisan support in the Virginia legislature until it was blocked by Youngkin’s administration.
“The governor will not support any measures that seek to prosecute women,” Youngkin’s spokeswoman Macaulay Porter wrote to The Washington Post.
After Cleary made her argument that the rejection was about protecting the scope of search warrants, the committee set it aside, essentially killing it.
How sad that we even need a bill like this, especially given the strides women have made in traditionally male territory over the past couple of years. We finally have a female vice president, a female head of the Treasury Department and a woman directing a Major League Baseball team. Women trekked to the South Pole solo, refereed the Super Bowl and the World Cup, flew jets, took control of U.S. military commands and brought home the majority of the medals from the Tokyo Olympic Games.
During all these accomplishments, women’s ability to control their own bodies decreased dramatically with the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. And here’s where something like a period-tracking app becomes important.
After the Supreme Court gave states the right to ban abortion last summer, some of the leaders who purport to value self-governance and privacy began an obsession with women’s bodies and physicians who treat them.
“In places that limit abortion, many types of data could be used to help prove, or at least provide supporting evidence, that someone attempted to receive or received an abortion, provided reproductive health services, or aided someone in doing so,” according to the Center for Democracy and Technology.
It’s been happening for years. It wasn’t period trackers, but rather “less sophisticated forms of data and technology — text messages and Google histories — were wielded as evidence in some of these cases,” wrote Laura Huss, a researcher for the reproductive nonprofit group If/When/How. She found 61 cases between 2000 and 2020 of women being investigated or arrested for their own, selfmanaged abortions.
Purvi Patel was one of the most famous cases. The Indiana woman was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2015 after prosecutors used her web visit to the “National Abortion Federation: Abortion after Twelve Weeks” page to charge her with feticide. Her case was later overturned.
Mike Pence was her governor at the time. And when he signed a law placing further restriction on abortion, a movement called Periods for Pence flooded his office with calls, emails and social media tags with explicit details about their menstrual flow, bloating and tampon pain.
Similar campaigns targeted Gov. Matt Bevin in Kentucky. In Arizona, when the state legislature didn’t want to take up a bill supplying female inmates with free sanitary products, women sent lawmakers their own pads and tampons — used.
Any chance Youngkin might welcome tracking periods like this?