Kake's Reading List

Apparently this is Still A Thing: Woman denied permanent birth control on NHS wins case with ombudsman. I.e. she was asking for sterilisation, and significant barriers are still being put in the way when women ask for this, compared to men asking for vasectomy.

Conceding that

Female sterilisation, or tubal ligation, is a surgical procedure that involves sealing, cutting or blocking the fallopian tubes to prevent eggs from reaching the uterus. It is usually performed under general anaesthetic via keyhole surgery and requires a few weeks of recovery. In contrast, a vasectomy is a minor outpatient procedure, typically carried out under local anaesthetic in under 30 minutes.
While both procedures serve the same purpose, permanent contraception, the ombudsman’s investigation found that the NHS was in effect treating them as different tiers of care, placing significant barriers in front of women while offering men a more straightforward pathway.
The investigation found that the ICB had denied women NHS funding based on the risk of “regret”, a criterion not applied to men seeking vasectomies.

While some of this is about its being a more serious operation, a lot of it comes down to 'maybe she will regret it'. Sigh. Not all women are happy with the various forms of long-term contraception which one 'emeritus professor' (it is not stated of what) says are equivalent and leave options open.

This is a different, and very strange, story about reproduction: ‘It’s super weird, super odd, super rare’: meet the twins who have different dads.

I think there may have been some potentially similar phenomena collected by the sort of docs who collected Weird Medical Phenomena - come on down, Gould and Pyle and their Anomalies and curiosities of medicine : being an encyclopedic collection of rare and extraordinary cases, and of the most striking instances of abnormality in all branches of medicine and surgery derived from an exhaustive research of medical literature from its origin to the present day (1901), which includes 'twins of different colour' which before DNA testing was presumably the only means by which one might even suspect a case of this sort.

Have also looked up papers of doc who also did this kind of thing and see reference to blood grouping in twins, which might also have been a clue to this? or not - would fraternal twins necessarily have same blood group.