What responsibility does an obstetric worker have...

Great Debates
1

…to keep parents from giving their children idiotic names? Case in point: Last night a 12-year-old boy named Nazia Banks was murdered on the South Side of Chicago. No thought was given by his parents of his being mentioned on the news, whether as a victim of a shooting or as a recipient of a Nobel Prize, and whoever filled out his birth certificate did not stop and ask, “You want to name him ‘Nausea?’” *

Does that seem right to you? Or should nurses just make sure they have the spelling correct, allowing the child to be cast defenseless into a lifetime of people making fun of his name, even after his murder? And do none of these people know that Nazia is a girl name?

    • “Nazia” and “nausea” are pronounced much the same way in Chicago.
2

Hah! There was a student last year named Champane. :frowning:

We also get lots of things like:

Isiah
Issiah

and other weird variants of otherwise common names. Maybe the parents can’t spell.

The nurse wouldn’t let me leave before I gave my son a middle name. I didn’t WANT him to have a middle name, but she wouldn’t let me go. So he got stuck with a middle name I don’t like. It’s costing me $300 in court costs alone to finally get around and change it.

3

She probably though the first name you chose was so stupid that he might want a fallback name. :smiley:

Had a friend named Latrina. Basically Latrine with a feminine suffix. At least they got that part right.

4

I have a cousin who is a NICU nurse. She says once she saw a doctor flatly tell a patient “you can’t name your baby that, it’s illegal.”

The patient was (fortunately) stupid enough to buy it – I don’t remember what the intended name was but it was something awful.

This was in TN, FWIW.

5

OMG, living in Flint so long, I’ve heard SO many ridiculous, atrocious concoctions that passed for first names…:eek: Concokshawanna…

6

Nazia apparently means pride in Arabic. Just because people in Chicago think it is weird is irrelevant. Do you really think nurses and doctors should be able to tell parents what they can’t name their kids? Would you be okay if Dr. Nazia Jones tells some couple they can’t name their kid Harper or Sophia?

Lastly, what kind of person reads an article about an innocent kid being gunned down for no reason while playing outside, and thinks the origin of his name is the important takeaway from the article in question?

7

I recall a UL which attributes many popular African-American names to the suggestions of mischievous white obstetricians or nurses in public hospitals. (One name in the story was “Urethra” . . . can’t expect AAs to spell it right, can we, Ms. Franklin? ;))

8

I would rather the doctors and nurses focus on caring for their patients instead of making sure dropzone’s feelings regarding nomenclature aren’t offended.

9

That’s nice, except it sounds like “pukeish” in English.

Yep. And with a complete explanation why and maybe give them time to come up with something better. It’s the kid’s feelings I’m thinking of, not the parents’.

Yes, if they live someplace where Harper or Sophia are homophones with something that would get the kid laughed at in school. Kids have enough trouble. No point in making it worse. And at the very least Dr Jones should say, “Nazia is a girl name.” :wink:

Actually, I heard it on the radio, coming in on the very end of the story. It shocked me awake because I consider some names to be akin to child abuse.

10

To you, someone who is apparently ignorant about Arabic, incurious enough to google the name in order to educate your self, yet righteously indignant enough to post ethnocentric drivel about how the nannystate should prevent people from exercising their rights as a parent. It only sounds “pukeish” to you because you are not used to it, and apparently have pretty narrow horizons.

Regardless, it doesn’t matter what you think. It’s their kid. It’s not as if they named him “Hitler Pedophile Jones”. It’s a perfectly legitimate name with a long history you just happen to not be aware of. Especially since if we adopted your logic, nobody could name their kid Richard, Ralph, or John because they are (respectively) nicknames for a penis, throwing up, and a person who visits prostitutes. Would you be for that? Of course not, because this rant is about you, not detrimental naming conventions. How do I know that? Because you could have picked a number of legitimate, arguable examples like, “Adolf Hitler” and “Aryan Nation”.

Good thing you have absolutely no power to enact such misguided policies. While these nurses and doctors are doing this, who should be doing the life saving? Should we hire new people to brainstorm names with “misguided” parents who happen to think Arabic names are legitimate?

Do you have any reason to think most people would react as poorly as you are to to hearing the name?

Weak sauce. I sincerely doubt the name Nazia would represent any real stumbling block.

I agree. That’s why we shouldn’t let them have gay parents, be minorities, speak other languages, eat “pukeish” foods, be handicapped, or dress differently, right? I mean, why make it harder on them.

Then you have a weird set of priorities. If you hear about an unmitigated tragedy, and you are moved enough to post about it on a message board, yet your focus is, “why can parents name their kids weird names”, when the name is not, in fact, weird or unusual, or relevant at all, I think you have some mixed up priorities to say the least. Far more detrimental to young Nazia, I would think, was living in a dangerous neighborhood where kids get shoot for no reason; not his name.

But I digress, you are right. We should outlaw being different. It should literally be our top priority.

11

I cannot understand the popularity of Madison as a girl’s name. To me it’s a president’s family name, an important avenue in Manhattan or the single most common name for a city in the United States.

Freakonomics:

When looking at a list of names many years ago when expecting our first child, my wife had a comment about the name Bathhilda that broke me up at the time and that she and I refer to whenever we come across a weird name.
“We hate this baby, let’s name her Bathhilda”.

12

Couldn’t find that exactly on Snopes, but here’s several other versions.

13

Do the nurses fill in the birth registration paperwork for you? That seems kind of intrusive. We were issued the official forms in the hospital and told we had 60(?) days to mail them in or we could be fined. Sounds like a vastly preferable system to one where you can apparently be held hostage until you give your child a set of names the nurse approves of.

14

…is a joke thread? A parody? Was the first thought that came to mind when reading that article was not “what a horrible, tragic incident” but “how dare a parent exercise their democratic right and name their child an extremely common name!”

The answer to your question is: no, naming your child Nazia is not child abuse, nor does a obstetric worker have any responsibility to keep parents from giving their children idiotic names principally because “idiotic” is subjective. Your OP is offensive to not only the family in the OP but also to people with different cultural backgrounds to the OP. I still can’t believe you actually wrote what you wrote.

15

No, they don’t in the U.S. either. Most parents fill out the form in the hospital and turn it in to a hospital worker. You can leave the hospital without naming your baby and then you’d be responsible for mailing the form in yourself, but I have heard that they sometimes pressure parents to do it before leaving. The idea that the nurses should have any part in choosing a name is obviously bizarre.

16

Just out of curiosity, where did you get this pronunciation? I have never heard this name but I wouldn’t trust the news reporters to pronounce it correctly either. But, I could very easily see this name being pronounced something like Nahz-eye-a, which, if I heard it pronounced, wouldn’t necessarily remind me of vomitting. I’m from Chicago too, if it matters.

17

…the saddest thing about this thread is that we are now on the front page of google searches for the name in the OP. Way to go in internet infamy Dropzone!

18

I did. That’s how I learned it was a girl name. :stuck_out_tongue:

Southsiders, like my wife, pronounce them similarly: NAH-zee-ah. OTOH, the radio anchorman on WBBM pronounced it NAW-zee-ah, which set me off because any idiot, including me, would pronounce it nah-ZEE-ah and I might not have noticed.

When my wife had our kids hospital staffers filled out the forms.

19

I do my part, but I can’t do it all alone, no matter how much it looks like I do. Some of you should also post while cranky.

20

[aside] Have a friend who named her son Lincoln. Her mother and I had to wait until she was out of the room before we could poke his iddle tummy and sing, “Lincoln, Lincoln, Bo-Binken, Banana-fanna-fo-finken…”

Glad she didn’t name him Chuck. :eek: [/aside]