Procuring reliable reproductive health care can be a difficult task under the best of circumstances. Factor in increasing political restrictions on basic health care and the unfamiliarity of traveling to a new area and the search can seem like more trouble than it’s worth; a circumstance which ultimately puts health at risk.
However, an open-source database known as Gynopedia is emerging as a resource in the search for women’s health care throughout the world. The site is searchable by both city and services, which can include emergency contraception, disease testing, and pregnancy exams.
Further, the site recommends safe and reputable clinics for pregnancy terminations based on user feedback.
The creator of Gynopedia, Lani Fried, pursued the idea to fill a need that she came across in her own life. When asked about the inspiration for the site, she simply replied, "Honestly, because I couldn’t find anything like it." The realization came last year when she realized how difficult it was to procure useful information for her upcoming trip to Asia.
She states on the site:
"...I'm someone who has been uninsured, in need of health care and lost in cities many times — and that's just me. There are millions of women who have it much worse — cut off from information and progressive health care, isolated from so many resources.
A substantial threat to the efficacy of a crowdsourced medical resource, especially one pertaining to the mired issue of reproductive rights, is the risk of bad information, intentional or not. Such a site would likely serve as an obvious target of those fighting against women’s access to reproductive medical services.
As of now, there are guidelines in place, but nothing foolproof. However, she hopes that a loyal and diligent community surrounding the site will serve to keep the information topical and uncompromised. Fried says, "My main goal now is to recruit more contributors so that we can grow into a full-on Wiki and always be current."
Hopefully, her efforts will be enough to ease the burden of finding basic health care when women are away from home.
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Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.