Prince George's County bills seek fibroid care, workplace protections for women

Prince George’s County Councilwoman Wala Blegay is trying to turn fibroid care into a workplace rights issue, with two bills that would let women experiencing symptoms request time off and require county staff to understand how those requests should be handled.

The proposal puts county government squarely into a problem that many women say has been treated as private, embarrassing or easy to ignore until it becomes severe. Kym Lee-King described years of pain, heavy bleeding and embarrassment before she understood what was happening to her body. She said she was diagnosed in 2014 and spent years ignoring the problem while the tumors grew, a reminder that the policy fight is not only about health education but about how women manage symptoms while trying to work, care for families and keep up with daily routines.

Blegay’s bills would do more than raise awareness. They would create a pathway for women who are dealing with fibroid symptoms to ask for time off, while also educating county employees about what those requests can look like and how to respond. That matters in a county where many residents commute across the Washington region and where a missed shift, a painful episode or repeated bleeding can quickly become a job problem as much as a medical one.

Dr. Kassandra Scales of Kaiser Permanente said fibroid symptoms can include heavy periods, longer or more frequent periods, bleeding between periods and pain in the stomach or lower back, though some women have no symptoms at all. The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development says uterine fibroids are benign growths in or on the uterus and are the most common non-cancerous tumors in women of childbearing age. The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences says about 35 million to 40 million women in the United States have fibroids, and that they are three times more common in Black women and twice as common in Hispanic women compared with White women.

That disparity helps explain why the issue has drawn attention in Prince George’s County, where Black women make up a large share of the population. Research has also shown the workplace costs: African-American women with symptomatic fibroids were more likely to miss work days, and newer studies found the condition can slow careers and push Black women academics to delay treatment because of professional demands.

The county’s public-hearing calendar listed hearings and comment opportunities on April 28, the same day the fibroid bills were in view. If the measures advance, Prince George’s could become a test case for whether local government can move beyond awareness and create real workplace protections for a condition that has long been managed in silence.