Beyoncé announced her first pregnancy live at the 2011 MTV Video Music Awards. At that moment, Twitter experienced an unprecedented spike: 8,868 tweets per second, the most activity ever recorded. In an instant, Beyoncé’s became the most famous fetus in the world.

It’s small wonder that Beyoncé’s baby took her first breaths in a birthing suite entirely unlike those available to the rest of us. That’s because the Knowles-Carter family shelled out the cash for a VIP labor experience at New York City’s Lenox Hill Hospital, where, for $2,000 a day, you can deliver your little one in a bubble, thoroughly insulated from the usual dangers of American childbirth.

For those with the means, seeking high-priced alternative care is a rational response to the state of maternal well-being in the United States. Between 1990 and 2015, while maternal mortality rates dropped precipitously in most of the world, pregnancy-related death rates for American mothers rose by more than 50 percent. By 2013, maternal mortality was more prevalent in the United States than in Iran, Romania, or Vietnam.