UK Performs First 15-Minute Female 'Vasectomy'

An inspired way to bring awareness to the neutering issue

(NEWSER) - This has got to be one of PETA’s weirdest stunts yet: The animal rights group is staging a contest related to its spay/neuter campaign, and the lucky winner will get … a free vasectomy. To enter, you just get your cat or dog spayed or neutered, then submit an essay answering the question, “Why should PETA neuter you?” But hurry, you only have until April 27 to enter, Fox News reports. Click for more fun with PETA. More»

Start of 'cash for vasectomy' program in Britain

(NEWSER) - Here's an odd bit of international relations: An American charity has paid a British heroin addict to undergo a vasectomy. The group, called Project Prevention , paid the man about $315 dollars in the hope of preventing him from passing his addiction on to the next generation. The man, John, said he'd been thinking about the operation for a while, but the money "spurred" him to act, reports the Telegraph . More»

(USER SUBMITTED) - As part of a plan to control population explosion, China's health authorities plan to sterilize 10,000 people in southern China over the next four days. The campaign in Puning City calls for people who already have at least one child to be sterilized; many who decline the surgery are expected to be sterilized against their will, a practice which Amnesty International says "amounts to torture." More»

Believe it or not, baby boys used to wear pink, too

(NEWSER) - If ever there was a color that stereotypically symbolized the feminine, it’s pink. But the history of the girly shade hasn’t always been so ladylike. Slate takes a look back:

• Financial Times: Its salmon-pink pages have turned “salmon press” into British shorthand for any newspaper business section.
• Boys' rowing: Teams at Eton and Westminster competed for the right to claim pink as their school color in the 19th century.
• Nantucket Red: The shade, which looks a lot like pink, became popular for preppy men and women in 1945.

Father is out of the picture, but baby is doing fine

(NEWSER) - Two female partners recruited a sperm donor and are now successfully raising a baby together—but no, they're not witnesses in the recent Prop 8 trial—they're not even human. The ladies are a pair of royal albatrosses living in a New Zealand breeding colony, and a head ranger calls their situation "quite unusual," although it has happened two other times in the same colony during the past 70 years. More»