Description and Official Rationale The baby emerges from the birth canal covered with vernix, a white, waxy substance, and blood, and sometimes meconium (fetal bowel movement). In other words, under the technocratic model, it is born dirty and needs to be cleaned. As soon after birth as possible, the baby will be whisked away from the delivery table by a nurse, and washed. Physiological Effects Vernix is a protective coating that prevents the baby's skin from getting too dry. Many health care practitioners believe that it is good for the baby's skin and so should be massaged into the skin instead of being washed off. Women's Responses In conversation, July Sanders said: They didn't even clean him off--I mean just wiped him off with a little gauze and stuff or a blanket, and they didn't take him off me and bathe him or clean him off until 1:30. I was sitting up in the rocking chair rocking him when they came in. You know, he was still sticky and had dried blood on him which was beautiful. Responded Elsie Drew: I know. That's really--I really wanted to see Kristin like that and they washed her off before they gave her to me. I wanted to see her all covered with vernix--I wanted to see her and know her just exactly as she was when she came out of me. Ritual Purposes Blood and vernix are natural substances that must immediately be removed from society's product because their presence threatens the fragile conceptual framework (so painstakingly established and guarded through hospital birth rituals) within which the birth takes place-- the framework that claims that the institution produces the baby. To wash the baby before giving it to the mother is in part to conceptually remove it from its natural origins and to begin immediately the process of enculturation. As I wrote in my journal some years ago: The baby I saw born today was inchoate against the green crisp shapes of the sterile sheets--blotchily, frighteningly white and red, leaking at the edges, formed and formless--a true anomaly, totally out of place in that over-formed green world of clean edges and sharp boundaries. No wonder the baby is so quickly cleaned, and wrapped, and whisked away.