Over the next week or so, presumably, we can expect to hear that prostate screenings can be pushed back to every 5 years over age 70, and colonoscopies…well, why not just get rid of those nasty things altogether?

Well baby visits for infants will be scaled back to a newborn check in the hospital (an outpatient stay, if possible) and a check-up on the first birthday.  After that, it’s see you when you need to get birth control pills or have an abortion if you’re a girl and, I guess, see you whenever if you’re a boy.  What about vaccinations, you’re thinking.  Well, since all the Lola Granola moms insist they have so much mercury in them that they do more harm than good, why not just dispense with them altogether?

Maybe if we get rid of all that costly, unnecessary diagnostic testing and preventative medicine, we’ll be able to afford nationalized health care after all.  I mean, if we’re all dead before we’re old enough to need nursing home care, paying for it will be a breeze.  Besides, think of the savings to Social Security.  Too bad W. didn’t think of something as beautifully simple as killing off all the old people when he tried so hard to reform Social Security.  Who needs death panels when we can just let everybody die of benign neglect?

Or maybe you think I’m being paranoid?  The New York Times does:

Arriving on the heels of hotly disputed guidelines calling for less use of mammography, the new recommendations might seem like part of a larger plan to slash cancer screening for women. But the timing was coincidental, said Dr. Cheryl B. Iglesia, the chairwoman of a panel in the obstetricians’ group that developed the Pap smear guidelines. The group updates its advice regularly based on new medical information, and Dr. Iglesia said the latest recommendations had been in the works for several years, “long before the Obama health plan came into existence.”

She called the timing crazy, uncanny and “an unfortunate perfect storm,” adding, “There’s no political agenda with regard to these recommendations.”

Thank God.  It’s all just a big, incredible coincidence.  Don’t I feel silly.

Names have been on my mind lately, since we have to choose one for our fourth daughter next month. Our first and third daughters have traditional, mainstream names, Elizabeth and Theresa, and we didn’t catch any flak about those. Our second daughter, on the other hand, we called Cordelia, and we got an earful from a couple of relatives about it. The relatives have come around and now really like the name, and most importantly, Cordelia herself loves it.

When we chose it, I didn’t think Cordelia was that much more unusual than some of the other old-fashioned names that have seen a resurgence of popularity recently, but the Social Security Administration says otherwise on their Popular Baby Names website.

This is a site where an expectant mother can really waste some serious time. You can see the top 20, 100 or 1000 baby names of both sexes for the United States and for each state individually. You can also track the popularity of any name over the past hundred years. For example, Cordelia usually came in between #400 and 700 for the first few decades of the twentieth century, then dipped slowly downward until 1950, then disappeared without a trace. In 2003, the year we named our Cordelia, I was amazed to find that names like Imani (#329), Itzel (#434 and yes, for a girl), Justice (#451), Isis (#585), Teagan (#636) and Meadow (#761) far outranked it.

I think we’ve finally decided on daughter #4’s name, but I’m keeping mum on the blog until it’s official, except to say that it’s not on this year’s top 1000 list either.

And no, it isn’t Hildegarde.