I recall hearing many years ago a physician talking about the nature of disease, and he went to some length to drive home the point that, under the medical community’s accepted definition of disease, pregnancy clearly fit the criteria.
(The underlying point was that people should understand better the effect of pregnancy on a woman’s body, and accept that changes in daily life are something that should be accepted, not thought of as weird or unusual.)
So, in medical terms, was this guy talking fast and loose on what constitutes a disease, or was he pretty much on the mark?
It’s sort of like the question about whether old age is a disease. Some researchers complain that the FDA won’t approve anti-aging treatments because they see old age as a natural process and not a pathology. They’ll only look at individual conditions such as arthritis that may be associated with aging but are not necessarily expected or normal bodily processes.
Going by that sort of definition, pregnancy is definitely not a disease, but one could still recognize that it significantly impacts your life.
It depends on what you mean by “normal functioning”.
I think it’s pretty clear that when a woman gets pregnant, has all of those hormonal and other changes happen, and has a baby, her body is functioning normally*. Yes, she’ll go to the doctor 50 times, but that’s to watch everything and make sure it stays normal.
*That is, all of her body parts are functioning the way they are intended to function.
I agree this is a semantic discussion. I also agree that pregnancy itself is a normal function. But I’m not sure I agree that pregnant functioning is necessarily normal functioning. Some of that pregnant functioning can be hard on a woman’s other biological systems. For example, its not uncommon for the hormonal changes to trigger gallbladder problems. If my gallbladder were fine before pregnancy, pregnancy triggered hormone changes, and those hormone changes triggered gallbladder problems, I would say that it was the deviation of my hormone levels from the norm due to pregnancy that caused the problem. Yes, those levels are normal for pregnancy, but they aren’t the norm for the human digestive system, leading to problems.