Seeing Red

It’s easier for students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to get free condoms than tampons or pads if they find themselves in need on campus.

The UNC Student Stores pharmacy stocks an acrylic container with unlimited free condoms, including glow-in-the-dark and banana-flavored, as well as mint lubricant. 

On the next shelf, individual tampons cost $0.38 each. The pharmacy doesn’t sell individual pads, but students can pay $8.99 for a box of 40 ultra thin Kotex pads, which costs $5.99 at Target.

Students can request a free box of 25 condoms online and pick it up from Campus Health. This isn’t an option for pads or tampons, which cost about the same when bought in bulk. 

N.C. State University funds period products in 125 bathrooms, and the University of Mississippi stocks pads and tampons in 25. At Michigan State University, menstrual products are in all first-floor bathrooms. At UNC-CH, the university funds products in five buildings, and most bathrooms at the school don’t even have pads or tampons for sale. 

Rising UNC-CH senior Amelia Fisher said her period recently resumed unexpectedly during a psychology class, two days after she thought it had finished. She went to the bathroom, hoping it might be one of the few with products, but nothing was available. 

“I hadn’t restocked my backpack since my last cycle,” said Fisher, who returned to class. “The internal panic thinking about the walk home after I bled through my white dress made it hard to focus.”

A 2024 analysis of 111 bathrooms at UNC-CH by student group FlowForward found 27 dispensers, and only 11 of those were stocked. The group is pushing UNC-CH to expand access to free pads and tampons, arguing the move would lead to fewer students missing class because of an unexpected period.

“I don’t carry toilet paper everywhere I go. Why should I have to always carry a tampon?” asked recent graduate Jennifer Tran, who was a former FlowForward member.

UNC-CH media relations said in a statement that the school doesn’t currently plan to fund menstrual products across campus. “University funding is not typically used to support individual students’ personal medical needs,” the statement said. The school added that students can buy supplies “through the on-campus Student Stores Pharmacy and other retailers” and that some departments offer free products. (Faculty and staff generally buy and donate these products.)

It is hard to know what the university spends on student supplies, whether that’s condoms, tampons, pizza, or Beat Duke buttons. The budget includes $4.7 million in expenses for Campus Health supplies, materials, services and equipment; $5.6 million for the same categories in Student Affairs; and $108 million for Facilities. “We budget at expense category levels, and not at the granular level,” the university said in response to a request for more detailed records.

John Hood, a conservative North Carolina columnist and president of the John William Pope Foundation, which promotes personal responsibility, said college students, unlike middle schoolers or high schoolers, can work and pay for their own period products. Universities don’t have unlimited money and can’t finance all student necessities, he said.

Upon learning that UNC-CH offers free condoms on campus, though, he assessed the situation differently. “Good Lord. Free condoms is a benefit to both sexes, but you cross the boundary of ‘adults are responsible for their own needs,’” he said. “If the university is giving away free condoms like that, they ought to give away free feminine products. Absolutely.”

Flow it Forward

Students are trying to fill the void. 

The UNC-CH undergraduate student Senate submitted a resolution to the administration requesting free menstrual products in all restrooms in 2023.

The student-led Residence Hall Association uses part of its budget to place a limited number of products in dorms. 

FlowForward students use grants and money from fundraisers to buy and place products in 16 bathrooms on campus. In March, the group bought three free-product dispensers from the period product company Aunt Flow for about $340 each. The Student Union arranged to install them in three bathrooms.

University personnel said the students would have to install the dispensers themselves if they wanted to put them in bathrooms elsewhere on campus. “That was kind of scary. We are drilling into the school—academic buildings and libraries,” said FlowForward co-president Nayan Bala, adding that they decided not to try. 

The group, whose logo is a ram with fallopian tubes shadowing the horns, received one-time funding from the student-led UNC Student Safety and Security Committee, at the suggestion of administrators. But Bala said that’s not a reliable solution since many groups are competing for that money.

FlowForward would like the university to take over the $12,000 the group now pays to stock the 16 bathrooms. In March, Bala and two other FlowForward members met with Aaron Bachenheimer, associate vice chancellor for student engagement, and Amy Johnson, vice chancellor for student affairs. The students asked if the university would consider a $1-per-student fee to fund period products. 

“Dr. Bachenheimer said they don’t want to institute something the whole student body has to pay for when only 60 percent of the student body menstruates,” Bala recounted. 

Student fees help fund athletic facilities and salaries, Carolina Performing Arts, Student Legal Services, and other programs, according to the University Cashier website.

N.C. State launched a pilot program supplying free period products in a limited number of bathrooms in 2022 after a student-led organization, We Bleed Red, pushed for it. In 2024, the university began funding products permanently in 125 bathrooms.

“Because it was so well received, it was kind of a no-brainer,” said Donna McGalliard, NCSU associate vice chancellor. The initial cost, including dispensers, was $97,000, she said.

Last fiscal year, NCSU’s Facilities Division spent $51,200 on supplies, according to a spokesman. 

According to its website, Aunt Flow worked with 417 higher education customers in 2024 and 600 lower-level schools. Also, employers and businesses across the country also provide free products to employees and customers. Tampons and pads are available at the National Hockey League’s corporate headquarters in New York, for example, as well as at local independent businesses such as Brandwein’s Bagels in Chapel Hill and Crafty Beer, Wine & Spirits bar in Raleigh.

An estimated 86 percent of women have found themselves without supplies when their period started in public, according to research data from Aunt Flow.

Panic at the Bathroom

Fenley Hamilton, who just graduated from UNC-CH, remembers sitting in a bathroom stall in Gardner Hall sizing up her backpack hanging on the back of the metal door. She wondered if she loosened the straps as much as possible, would it drop low enough to hide potential blood stains on her jeans? Her period just started and there were no tampons or pads anywhere in the building. She had given her “emergency” tampon to a classmate a few days earlier and forgot to restock her backpack.

Hamilton decided she couldn’t risk going to her next class and quickly walked home.

“I missed the lecture and had to get notes from someone else and learn it on my own,” Hamilton said. “It counted as one of my unexcused absences, and we only get two a semester.”

Her panic in the bathroom is just one of a steady stream of stories from those caught without products on campus.

For this story, I surveyed 100 members of UNC-CH’s Chi Omega sorority. I found that 7 percent said they had missed class because they didn’t have a tampon or pad on campus. All of them said the university needs to make products more available in academic buildings, and 66 percent said they had never seen menstrual products in any public bathrooms. A sample of the sorority members’ responses to the written survey, most of them submitted anonymously, convey a general feeling:

• “It is unfair. Dudes don’t have to think about it.”
• “There are so many times when I’ve had to frantically call or text friends asking if they are on campus and have a tampon. My period should not be a roadblock in my studying.”
• “I got my period in class and had to make a DIY pad out of toilet paper and go back to class.”

The term “DIY pad” appeared multiple times in responses to the written survey. That’s what these women call the art of rolling up toilet paper to create a makeshift maxi pad.

“People shoving tissue down there isn’t good. Bits of it can end up in the vagina and cause a discharge. There is a burden of people getting sick from this,” said Dr. Sarah Maddison, who works for Mid-Carolina Obstetrics & Gynecology in Raleigh. While this isn’t common, she said makeshift pads and an overall lack of products cause girls to worry and feel embarrassed, and that affects academic performance and mental health. 

She adds that she considers menstruation a natural bodily function, not a personal medical need.

Women’s health experts said young people are much more confident in talking openly about their periods than they would have been as recently as a generation ago.

“Anything you can do, I can do bleeding,” is a frequent phrase emblazoned on T-shirts and stickers on water bottles. Demonstrators carry signs with slogans such as “Period Supplies are School Supplies” on Period Action Day, which is October 11.

“Our most successful programs are student-led initiatives,” said Michelle Schaefer, who leads the Diaper Bank of North Carolina. Along with distributing diapers, the nonprofit collects and donates period supplies to more than 300 public schools across North Carolina. It also oversees “Period Power” clubs for middle school and high school students.

“Students should be focused on learning, homework, band, sports, and building friendships, not worrying about whether they or their classmates will have access to period products,” Schaefer said. “Ensuring that basic needs are provided should not be the responsibility of students.” 

Katherine Snow Smith teaches journalism and communications as an adjunct instructor at UNC-Chapel Hill and Campbell University. She is a former reporter and editor at The Tampa Bay Times and is the author of Stepping on the Blender and Other Times Life Gets Messy and Rules for the Southern Rulebreaker.