Just as the woman in labor, in transition from one social identity to another, undergoing one of the most profound transformations she may ever experience in her cultural life, enters the place of her initiation, so will she leave it:

It's almost like programming you. You get to the hospital. They put you in this wheelchair. They whisk you off from your husband. And I mean just start in on you. Then they put you in another wheelchair, and send you home. And then they say, well, we need to give her something for the depression. (Laughs) Get away from me! That will help my depression!

-July Sanders

No matter what kind of birth the new mother has experienced in the hospital, no matter how healthy and strong she may or may not feel, institutional insurance requirements usually necessitate that she be carried out in a wheelchair. So the message going out of the hospital becomes the message coming in, as she is once again symbolically reminded that she cannot stand on her own, that she is still--even as she begins her new life as a mother--dis-abled and dependent on society and the institutions that control and disseminate its technological representations.