Baby Names: Does Popularity Affect Choice? | Newsweek Culture

BOOKS
‘Thomas Hardy: A Time-Torn Man’
5/11/2008 12:00:00 AM
Then the midwife, turning back to the small scrap of humanity, looked closely at him and exclaimed, 'Dead! Stop a minute, he's alive enough, sure!'¹ And so he was: tiny, weak, hardly expected to survive for long, but not dead yet.²
WOMEN’S HEALTH
Biological Alarm Clock
Joan Raymond 5/6/2008 12:00:00 AM
Nancy Caspell thinks she can have it all. At age 28, she isn't ready for children. Even though she's not in a serious relationship, she figures by the time she hits age 35 or 40 she'll have met the man of her dreams, be more established in her career and, as with all happy endings, finally be ready for pregnancies and kids.
FAMILY
Getting Away With It
Raina Kelley 4/30/2008 12:00:00 AM
It's considered a "fact" of sibling relations: the baby of the family always gets away with murder. If the oldest brother had a curfew of 11 p.m. on weekends, his baby sister just has to call if she's staying out all night. But can it be proven that parents are always stricter with their first born?
COSMETIC SURGERY
Mommy 2.0
Karen Springen 4/15/2008 12:00:00 AM
When she was pregnant with her son Junior, who turns nine this month, Gabriela Acosta ballooned from 115 pounds to 196. Acosta lost the weight but wound up with stretched, saggy skin. Even her son noticed it. He told her that her stomach looked "pruney," the result, he thought, of staying in the shower too long. So the 29-year-old stay-at-home mom scheduled a consultation with Dr. Michael Salzhauer, a board-certified plastic surgeon in Bal Harbour, Fla.
The Deepest Cut
Jennie Yabroff 4/14/2008 12:00:00 AM
Stephanie Queller was an unreconstructed glamour girl who worked as a fashion designer and wore Manolo Blahniks and rhinestone-studded tank tops. Cancer, first in her breasts and then in her ovaries, destroyed her body, leaving her unable to eat or care for herself, before killing her at the age of 58. Eleven months later her daughter Jessica, a writer for the TV show "Gossip Girl," tested positive for the breast cancer gene mutation BRCA1, at the age of 34. Queller learned that she had an 87 percent chance of developing breast cancer and a 44 percent chance of developing ovarian cancer. At the time she was hoping to get married and start a family. Instead she had to decide whether to remove her breasts and ovaries to reduce her odds of developing the disease. In her new memoir, "Pretty Is What Changes," Queller writes that "deciding whether to go to law school or take one's chances as a writer is a hard decision … Deciding to cut off your breasts when you don't have cancer and possibly never will? To me, that was insanity." Yet she ultimately decided to have a prophylactic double mastectomy, reducing her risk for breast cancer to just 3 percent, and plans to have her ovaries removed before she turns 40. (She's now 38.) Her sister Danielle also tested positive for BRCA and had a prophylactic mastectomy as well. Queller spoke to NEWSWEEK's Jennie Yabroff about her choice, her plans for children and her hopes for the future of breast cancer research.
LETTERS
The Few, the Proud, the Surrogates

"Womb For Rent": Readers were perplexed by the phenomenon and rate of military wives bearing babies for others. "We should be ashamed as Americans that our military members are so underpaid that the main reason these women are becoming surrogates is for the money," one said. Whereas a retired airman wanted to know "Why taxpayers should pay for it," one nonmilitary surrogate going for her third birth underscored the altruistic. "Knowing that by giving just a year of my life to an infertile couple will give them a lifetime of happiness makes it all worth it."