What was going on when I was born?

The Department of Energy has drafted legislation to eliminate or cut back severely nearly all its programs to encourage energy conservation and to develop renewable fuel sources and other alternatives to oil. The Reagan Administration has already begun to chop back these programs through the budgetary process. The proposed law would dismantle most of them and greatly reduce funding levels for the rest.

A Superior Court judge ruled today that the faculty adviser of a high school newspaper must reveal the name of a student who interviewed a drug dealer if the local prosecutor could not obtain the dealer's name in a ''less intrusive'' way. The judge, Philip A. Gruccio, dismissed arguments that the paper - and by extension the adviser and reporter -was covered by First Amendment free-press guarantees as well as by New Jersey's ''shield'' law, which protects news organizations from compulsion to name confidential sources. The judge said that if the Cumberland County Prosecutor could not get the name of the dealer by next Thursday he would order the adviser to name the reporter for a grand jury that day. The judge refused to say whether he would order the adviser to be jailed if he refused to testify.

A conference exploring the contributions of women in music since medieval times is taking place through Sunday at New York University, 35 West Fourth Street. Scheduled during the National Congress on Women in Music are a dozen concerts, panel discussions, workshops and the presentation of more than 80 papers on a vast array of topics. Medieval chants by women, songs of women troubadours, the works of Clara Schumann, jazz, gospel, ragtime and music by American Indian women and living women composers are among the concerns of the congress. Scholars, performers, composers and educators of both sexes, from the United States, Canada and abroad, are taking part. Some performances are at the Washington Square Methodist Church and the Park Avenue Synagogue. Admission is $15 for a day's events. For a concert only, the charge is $5 ($2.50 for the elderly); $2.50 for each nonconcert event. Information: 598-3492 or 598-3493.

''Britain needs a reformed and liberated political system without the pointless conflict, the dogma, the violent lurches of policy and the class antagonisms that the two old parties have fostered.'' - statement issued yesterday by the newly founded Social Democratic Party in Britain. (A1:3.)

Soon after giving birth to her latest offspring, Mrs. Long Ears scuttles off with a muskrat, leaving poor Daddy Long Ears to care for 31 bunnies. Elsewhere, Frannie is so painfully shy that she's worried she'll go through high school without being kissed. Then her girlfriends cook up The Popularity Plan, and she practically has to fight off the boys - except, alas, for Ronnie. So go some of the plots in the latest crop of children's books being brought out by American publishers. Despite all the hoopla and enormous advances heaped upon blockbusters for adults, books about cuddly bears and adolescents' tribulations regularly bring in pleasing sums of money.

In 1943, when Muddy Waters was 28 years old, he was working on a cotton plantation near Clarksdale, Miss., for 22 1/2 cents an hour. He felt he was being underpaid, but when he asked for a raise to 25 cents an hour the plantation overseer shouted and fumed. Mr. Waters worked one more week to save up a few dollars, and then he left Mississippi on a Chicago-bound passenger train. He never looked back. Within a few years he had established himself as the most popular of Chicago's many blues singers, and today, at 65, he enjoys a worldwide following. From New York to London to Tokyo, Muddy Waters is the blues. Tomorrow night, Mr. Waters and his band will be at the Beacon Theater, Broadway and 74th Street, at 8 P.M. Tickets are $10.50 and $11.50 and can be purchased through the theater's box office (874-1717), Chargit (944-9300), or Ticketron (977-9020). James Cotton, another blues man from Mississippi, will open the show, and Mr. Waters's special guest will be Johnny Winter, the white blues-rock guitarist. ''Johnny is going to play with my band and shake the house up,'' Mr. Waters predicted the other day. But when Muddy Waters wants to shake a house up, he doesn't need any help. ''I'm the Hoochie Coochie Man, everybody knows I am,'' he sings, and his voice is so rich and commanding, his authority so absolute, that one believes him unquestioningly.

Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr., breaking a 48-hour public silence, said today that he wanted to put aside the issue of Vice President Bush's appointment to the Administration's crisis management team and ''get on with the substance and the formulation of American foreign policy.'' Appearing before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee, Mr. Haig appeared Excerpts from remarks, page A12. to be seeking to appear nonchalant about the episode that has dominated talk in Washington since Mr. Bush's appointment Tuesday and led to reports that Mr. Haig was considering resignation over the seeming affront to his standing. ''I think enough has been said on this subject,'' Mr. Haig said to questions from the senators about the issue, ''I think our problem is to get on with the business of this country, for which the American people put Mr. Reagan in the White House.''

Some arrive in blue jeans and worn sneakers, others swathed in furs. Some leave small children in the waiting room to while away the fretful time with husbands or friends; others are children themselves. Some, apprehensive and uncertain, have never been there before; others smile and greet staff members by name. But whether they are junior high school students or middle-aged mothers, all of the women who go to Parkmed do so for the same reason: they are pregnant, and they don't want to be. A couple of hours and $235 later, their pregnancies have been terminated. Anti-abortion groups around the country are preparing for a major effort to overturn or restrict the 1973 Supreme Court ruling legalizing abortion. Among those who support a constitutional amendment banning abortions is President Reagan.

Marvin Davis, the multimillionaire Denver oil executive and wildcatter, surprised West Coast motion picture executives yesterday by abruptly backing out of a $700 million deal to take over the 20th Century-Fox Film Corporation. A spokesman for Fox said late yesterday that Mr. Davis's decision had been completely unexpected. ''We don't know the reason for it,'' he said. A woman who identified herself as Mr. Davis's secretary said in Denver that the executive was out of town and that he could not be reached for comment on his decision to withdraw his offer to pay $60 a share for Fox's 10.5 million shares, before certain adjustments. Mr. Davis was believed to be on his way to Denver last night from his Palm Springs, Calif., home to confer with his attorneys.

The New York State Board of Regents approved a plan today to accredit foreign medical schools. The plan seeks to upgrade the training of Americans studying medicine abroad and to control their re-entry into the state. The newly approved foreign institutions will be authorized to set up programs at hospital facilities in New York so those studying medicine abroad may return to the state to complete their last ''clinical years'' of training. The measure had been vigorously opposed by American medical schools and their accrediting arms.

The White House expressed ''growing concern'' today over signs that the Polish authorities might crack down on the labor movement or that the Soviet Union might ''undertake repressive action in Poland.'' In the Reagan Administration's most serious statement about the situation, the White House said: ''Any external intervention in Poland, or any measures aimed at suppressing the Polish people, would necessarily Text of statement is on page A9. cause deep concern to all those interested in the peaceful development of Poland, and could have a grave effect on the whole course of East-West relations.''

David A. Stockman, the budget director, asserted today that President Reagan would veto a bill that reduced individual income tax rates for only one year rather than the three years sought by the President. Mr. Reagan, meanwhile, conferred with the senior Republican on the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, Representative Barber B. Conable Jr. of upstate New York, and was reported to have said that he would fight for a three-year bill cutting income taxes 10 percent a year despite Mr. Conable's prediction that the heavily Democratic committee would reject it. Mr. Stockman's prediction, which went beyond his earlier statements that he would recommend a veto of a one-year bill, and Mr. Conable's account of his hourlong strategy session with Mr. Reagan and senior White House aides appeared to draw more sharply battle lines that had blurred some in recent days. 'Clear Working Assumption' Mr. Stockman would not say, when asked through a spokesman, whether Mr. Reagan had authorized him to predict a veto. Rather, the director of the Office of Management and Budget authorized the spokesman to say that ''this is the clear working assumption within the Administration.''