The Right to pee: Toilet Access on Planes
The Right to Pee: Toilet Access on Planes
I board the plane first and get off it last — depending on the flight, that alone adds 45 to 60 minutes onto however long I'm actually in the air.
On a Montreal–Toronto flight, about an hour, that's manageable — roughly two hours total without a toilet, and my body can handle that. On a longer flight, the math changes. To be safe, I stop drinking up to 12 hours before departure. I'm paraplegic; when my bladder is full, it empties on its own. I can't "hold it." Biology doesn't negotiate.
When a flight is delayed, that window stretches further, and going that long without fluids isn't just uncomfortable. Reduced, infrequent voiding is a documented UTI risk factor in people with spinal cord injuries (García Leoni & Esclarín De Ruz, 2003) — and a UTI makes the bladder even less able to hold urine. The loop starts with something as simple as a delay.
I also asked whether not drinking could contribute to blood clots — yes. Dehydration is a recognized risk factor for venous thromboembolism in flight, alongside immobility (Philbrick et al., 2007); a recent mechanistic review explains why, since cabin dehydration thickens the blood and raises clotting risk on its own (Tourn et al., 2025). The choice that protects my bladder raises a different risk entirely. There's no version of this that's simply safe.
Two flights make this concrete.
The first: Montreal to Minneapolis, via Toronto. I'd stopped drinking that morning. The Toronto–Minneapolis leg, a 7 p.m. departure, was delayed three hours — for a flight that's only 2.5 hours long. By the time I reached my hotel, it was 1 a.m. I'd gone more than 18 hours without drinking.
We teach children to pee before they leave the house, and to hold it until a toilet is available. That delay wasn't caused by something unsafe. It happened because the airline wanted both onboard toilets working before takeoff, instead of just one, for a flight that was only 2.5 hours long. For the roughly eighty other passengers, flying with a single working toilet would have meant a longer line — a real but ordinary inconvenience, the kind everyone can hold through for two and a half hours. For me, every extra hour of that delay meant another hour without drinking, stacked on top of what I'd already given up that morning. The same three-hour wait was optional comfort for eighty people and compounding medical risk for one. Everyone on that plane paid the same price for their seat. Only one of us was risking a UTI and a higher clotting risk to get there.
The second: Montreal to Calgary, delayed an hour because one of two toilets wasn't working. I told the gate agent exactly what that delay meant for me. She listened. Nothing came of it — no follow-up, no record my complaint went anywhere.
This isn't just my experience — it's documented. Toilet access is repeatedly named as a basic, unresolved barrier in air travel: "missing facilities" like accessible toilets, and "inadequate facilities" like on-board bathrooms too small to use independently (Gotti et al., 2024; Martín-Domingo et al., 2024). Boarding first and deplaning last is cited in the same literature as a practice that leaves disabled passengers feeling managed, not served (Gotti et al., 2024).
There's a version of this that's harder to explain: parenting through it. Flying with my son Thomas as a little guy, on my lap, I'd have to ask a toddler to hold it too — not because I decided that was reasonable, but because there's no way for me to get him to the plane's toilet myself. No aisle chair is sized for a child; no accommodation exists for a parent who can't walk her own kid to the bathroom. The plane's inaccessibility doesn't stop at me. It reaches into what I can do for him.
None of this is about one broken toilet, or one long delay. It's about who gets asked to plan their body — or their child's — around a flight schedule, and who doesn't. I'm not asking for something extra. I'm asking for the same basic right everyone else on that plane exercises without thinking twice about it.
Two things worth doing:
Ask for a reference number every time you report a problem. An agent who "listens" and does nothing leaves no trace. A complaint with a number attached is data the airline eventually answers for.
Back campaigns pushing for enforcement of protections that already exist, not just new ones. A rule on paper means little if nobody is holding anyone to it — that gap is exactly where complaints like mine keep disappearing. Check out: https://rightsonflights.com/
written by
Marjorie Aunos, PhD., is an internationally renowned researcher, adjunct professor, clinical psychologist, and award-winning inspirational speaker from Montreal, Canada.
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