Many thanks to Dr. Devora Steinmetz and Rabbi David Silber for sharing the Simḥat Bat ceremony they prepared for their oldest daughter in 1987. From the Simhat Bat explanatory notes:
We name our daughters on their fifteenth day of life. This is based on Vayiqra 12:1-5, which describes the length of a woman’s period of impurity after childbirth. If she gives birth to a son, she is impure for seven days; if she gives birth to a daughter, she is impure for fourteen days. The passage seems to connect the baby boy’s circumcision on the eighth day to the conclusion of the mother’s seven day period of impurity. (Similarly, Vayiqra 22:27 says that a newborn animal must remain with its mother for seven days, and on the eighth day and onward it is acceptable as a sacrificial offering.) It seems, then, that for the first seven days of a little boy’s life, and the first fourteen days of a little girl’s life, the child and mother are still closely linked, and both remain separate from the larger family and community. Then, on the eighth day of her son’s life, and on the fifteenth day of her daughter’s life, the mother begins to rejoin her family and community, and the child too becomes incorporated as a member of the family and community. That is why a baby boy’s father becomes obligated to circumcise his son only on the eighth day, and why the baby boy first receives his name at his brit milah; it is then that the baby boy becomes a member of the community of Israel. On our daughter’s fifteenth day, we come together as a family and as a community to welcome this new member and to give her a name.
Simḥat Bat by Devora Steinmetz and David Silber PDF | ODT | TXT
Shared by Devora Steinmetz and David Silber in the year 5770/2010 with a Creative Commons Attribution/ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 3.0 Unported license. (Some of this material was used in the Simḥat Bat ceremony of Rabbi Elie Kaunfer and Lisa Exler for their daughter.)
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[...] Lisa Exler shared this Simḥat Bat Ceremony in the year 5770/2010 with a CC BY-SA license. Some additional material in the Birkhat Hamazon (Blessing for the Meal) was prepared by Dr. Devora Steinmetz and R’ [...]
[...] both from teachers at Yeshivat Hadar (Mechon Hadar): one by Rav Elie Kaunfer and Lisa Exler, and one by Dr. Devora Steinmetz and Rabbi David [...]