Also, being pregnant does not mean you "aren't sick," not sure what gave you that idea.
And I meant that being pregnant is a normal healthy condition, that happens to normal healthy people. Sick people can be pregnant, of course, and sickness can be precipitated by being pregnant (like gestational diabetes), but in general it's something that happens normally, unlike illnesses.
It was normal, until early 20th century doctors (mostly male) decided that the midwives (mostly female) didn't actually know anything about childbirth. To protect women from the "incompetent" midwives, the doctor guild successfully exterminated their competition.
Midwives used to have little tricks for normal pregnancy problems, like how to get a breech baby to turn. Much of the institution's knowledge was lost in the Purge.
I realized a while back that there are two books called The American Way of Birth [1]. The local science library had a copy of the earlier one. This book examines the "medicalization" of normal female experiences.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13742782
This 2013 NY Times article [2] has a nice summary of the effects of the medicalization of childbirth on the costs thereof:
[...] Childbirth in the United States is uniquely
expensive, and maternity and newborn care constitute the
single biggest category of hospital payouts for most
commercial insurers and state Medicaid programs. The
cumulative costs of approximately four million annual
births is well over $50 billion.
[...]
Those payment incentives for providers also mean that
American women with normal pregnancies tend to get more of
everything, necessary or not, from blood tests to
ultrasound scans, said Katy Kozhimannil, a professor at
the University of Minnesota School of Public Health who
studies the cost of women’s health care.
[minor edits - formatting, etc]
The fact you couldn't purchase individual plans that covered these expenses is a huge testament to that. It was so expensive that it required the force of law to get insurance companies to cover them.