CA bill aims to provide ‘dignity’ and free menstrual hygiene products to female farmworkers

FRESNO, Calif. (KFSN) — A new state bill looks to fill a crucial healthcare need for female farmworkers in rural agricultural areas across California.

Tuesday, state leaders stood alongside female farmworkers and their families as they called on their colleagues for support to get the bill to the Governor’s desk.

For the past 18 years, Xochitl Nunez has harvested everything from grapes to pistachios in fields across the Central Valley.

“The hands of women farmworkers are something very valuable. Women are indispensable in the fields. You can look at any farm, and you see mainly women. Where I work, we are all women except one man,” says Nunez.

Like other female farmworkers, she suffers in silence as women who work in the fields lack access to feminine hygiene products.

“It’s taboo. We have men who look down upon this. They don’t have the consideration because it doesn’t matter to them, whether you feel good or bad, just as long as you come to work,” says Nunez.

Nunez says women often don’t have a choice, working miles away from the nearest store or clean restroom, forced to work in discomfort.

“At work sometimes, they don’t even give us toilet paper. A lot of times, it’s our job to bring the toilet paper because it runs out,” says Nunez.

Outside the state capitol on Tuesday, leaders who represent the more than 100,000 women who work in California agriculture, including Valley Assemblymen David Tangipa and Juan Alanis, announced AB 2082, or The Rural Farmworker Women’s Health Act.

“That’s just not inconvenient. That’s unacceptable. No woman should have to choose between her dignity and her paycheck,” says Assemblyman Jeff Gonzalez.

The bill would require the California Department of Public Health to partner with local nonprofits to help distribute free menstrual hygiene products to women who work in remote agricultural regions with the highest rates of poverty.

Elizabeth Sevilla is the daughter of a farmworker. She says it was common for her mom to turn to a last resort.

“She told me how she would use her rags, pieces of cardboard or even her own clothing because she had no other option,” says Sevilla.

The legislation seeks to bridge the healthcare gap, as accessibility for these frontline workers remains years behind.

“In schools, young women have free access to menstrual products and many workplaces. Women have access to what they need, but farmworker women, the women who work the land, who work in landscaping, who labor outdoors, and remote rural areas, they were left out. They remain invisible,” says Perla Sanchez, Daughter of farmworkers.

If the legislation clears the assembly and the senate, it will head to the governor’s desk later this year. If passed, it is slated to begin in July of 2027.

For news and weather updates, follow Brisa Colón on Facebook, X and Instagram.