My doctor said just remember that pregnancy is a state of health, not a disease, which I thought was rather nice. That was the one thing that stuck in my mind. I keep thinking about that and it's so true. If you’re feeling rotten, you just think you are alright – it's nothing to worry about. Very commonsense.

It's this concern with medicine that seems to override everything else – the natural process, I mean. I mean it is something women have always been brought up to; everybody knows that, okay, it's painful, having labour and everything, but it's very rewarding: it's the one pain we’ve been brought up to expect and not to be scared of. Before going to the hospital, pregnancy was a normal, nice condition. I’m not so sure it isn't an illness now.

While growing a baby is certainly not an illness like mumps or gastro-enteritis, it is paradoxically a medical condition – a condition to be monitored by doctors. Between seven and eighteen visits to the GP, local authority or hospital clinic were made during pregnancy by the sample women for antenatal care: the average was thirteen. Going to the doctor suggests illness, and two other features of illness are associated with pregnancy in modern industrialised society: a pregnant woman, like other ‘patients’, is allowed to give up her normal work, and is encouraged to hand over responsibility for the management of her condition to others (the medical profession). Moreover, pregnancy produces unpleasant symptoms, each of which, in other circumstances, can be a sign of illness: vomiting, changes in bowel habit (constipation or diarrhoea), frequent urination, excessive tiredness, abdominal pain, backache and so on. Even in pregnancy some of these require medication, a habit not normally associated with health. The most common ‘drugs’ used in pregnancy are iron and/or vitamin supplements, but many women are prescribed or prescribe for themselves others as well, so that the scale of medicine-taking during the process of becoming a mother usually far outweighs anything experienced beforehand. All the sample women took iron pills, more than a third took drugs to combat nausea, two out of five used indigestion mixtures, one in five laxatives, one in ten sleeping pills.