Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations? A Parent’s Honest Perspective
The mushy strawberry in Lila’s mimosa has been bobbing around for 20 minutes, and she hasn’t taken a sip. We’re at the weekend brunch spot by the playground, our four-year-olds are off chasing a squirrel through the wood chips, and she’s been circling the same question for an hour. She and her partner just got back from a two-week trip to Costa Rica, followed by a wedding long weekend in Napa—those were the two vacations they’d planned to squeeze in before kids, the ones they saved for for three years. Now they’re home, bags unpacked, and she can’t decide if they should start trying this month, or wait until after the girls’ trip to Greece they booked for next fall. “Everyone says you should get all your traveling out before the baby comes,” she says, picking at the edge of her napkin. “But what if waiting longer just makes it harder to get pregnant later?”
I tell her I’ve been there. Five years ago, my husband and I had just wrapped up two back-to-back trips: a 10-day hiking trip on British Columbia’s West Coast Trail and a three-week visit to his childhood home in New Zealand, also planned before we started trying for our son. We kept scrolling through fertility forums at night, flipping back and forth on whether to start trying immediately, or wait another three months for the small beach trip we’d booked for my best friend’s 30th. I was 32 then, no history of fertility issues, but every article I read made the panic creep in: what if it takes two years? What did we do? We waited. We went to the beach, drank too much rosé, stayed up until 2 a.m. talking, and got pregnant two months after we got home. But that’s just my story, I tell Lila. My cousin waited 18 months to check three big trips off her list before trying, and she was 36 by the time she started, and ended up needing two rounds of IVF that she might have avoided if she’d started earlier. Another friend started trying right after her first big pre-baby trip, got pregnant on the first try, and turned her second planned trip into a babymoon. She just skipped the 10-mile hikes and ate all the pasta instead, and said it was the best trip she ever took.
I don’t have the perfect answer for her, but there are a few small, concrete things I walked through that I encourage anyone in this spot to do, no big life overhaul required. First, pull out all your future trip confirmations right now, and read the fine print. Most people don’t realize that most travel insurance plans will cover full cancellation for unexpected pregnancy, if you bought the policy when you booked the trip. Most resorts and airlines will let you change your date for a $50 to $100 fee, even if you booked non-refundable. When I was going through this, I called the airline for our beach trip and asked, and they said I could change the date for no fee at all if I had a doctor’s note. That takes a lot of the pressure off—you don’t have to lose thousands of dollars just because you got pregnant earlier than you planned.
Second, book a 20-minute pre-conception checkup with your OB if you’re on the fence. That’s not a long, stressful appointment, you don’t need a million tests, but they can talk through your specific situation. If you’re over 35, or you’ve had irregular periods or past miscarriages, your doctor might tell you that there’s no reason to wait, and that even a few months can make a difference for your fertility. If you’re younger, or your blood work shows your ovarian reserve is healthy, then waiting another six or eight months for that trip you’ve been dreaming of is totally low-risk. When I went, my doctor told me that at 32, waiting a few extra months wasn’t going to change anything for me, and that took all the unspoken panic out of my decision. It’s concrete information, not something you can get from a random internet comment.
Third, write down two or three non-negotiable things you want out of that next trip, and be honest with yourself about them. Lila told me she wants to hike the caldera in Santorini, go cliff jumping with her friends, and stay out until 1 a.m. drinking ouzo at seaside tavernas. None of those are things she’d want to do if she was 12 weeks pregnant and exhausted all the time, or six months pregnant with a bump that makes long walks uncomfortable. That’s a real, valid reason to wait. If your next trip is just sitting on a beach in Florida, reading books and eating key lime pie, that’s totally doable pregnant—you can just drink virgin piña coladas and take naps whenever you want. There’s no unwritten rule that says all pre-baby vacations have to happen before you start trying.
By this point, my son runs over, covered in wood chips, holding a dead bug he wants to show me. I wipe his hands off on my jeans, give him a fry from my plate, and he runs back off. Lila leans back in her chair, and says she’d never thought about just calling the travel company to ask about changing the date, or booking that quick pre-conception appointment. She’d just been going back and forth in her head, assuming she had to pick one or the other: start trying now and lose the Greece trip, or wait and risk fertility issues later.
I tell her that’s the thing no one talks about with this decision: there’s no perfect answer. If you start trying now and have to reschedule your trip, you’ll get to go another time, probably with a tiny travel buddy that makes it a whole different kind of fun. If you wait and it takes longer than you expected to get pregnant, you’ll adjust, and there are doctors that can help you. I know people who swear waiting was the best decision they ever made, and people who say starting right away was the right call for them.
Lila pulls out her phone when we walk back to the playground, and books that pre-conception appointment for the following week. She says she’ll call the Greece trip organizer after that. She doesn’t have to decide today. As the kids climb on the jungle gym, I watch her snap a photo of my son hanging upside down from the monkey bars to send to her partner, and I don’t know what she’ll end up choosing. That’s okay. This decision isn’t about being right, it’s about what fits for her, right now.
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