Two years apart, I gave birth to two children in two cities, New York and London. During my first pregnancy, I was living on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, settling into our new duplex apartment when I received a phone call asking me whether I wanted to book myself in for a hospital tour. For me, the idea that you would tour a hospital before giving birth — as if it were a hotel into which you were deliberating checking in — sounded absurd. What could I possibly need to see? I was raised in Britain during a period in which the National Health Service (NHS) was still well funded, and a “one-size-fits-all” approach in which hospitals provided everyone with the best possible service predominated. Surrounded by the glitz and the glamour of American private health care, my European sense of bewilderment soon gave way to excitement at having the power to influence the delivery process of my first child.

As we walked around Mount Sinai West — an imposing ten-story building on Tenth Avenue on the West Side of Manhattan — the tour guide delivered a pitch. The hospital, she told me, was ranked highly for maternity outcomes, and the labor suite was designed with creating a comfortable family environment in mind.

This certainly seemed better than being told by a doctor which underfunded hospital to deliver at in Britain, as was the experience of my peers in the UK who had recently given birth. What the tour guide didn’t realize was that she didn’t need to go so hard on her sales pitch — the hospital, with its sparkling white floors and spacious bathrooms, spoke for itself. The look of the place made it that much easier to picture our first moments as a family of three. The cost of giving birth in the hospital equivalent of the Ritz-Carlton was, unsurprisingly, not cheap: staying over would cost me a hefty $900 a night, excluding all of the other costs for the delivery and aftercare.