Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations? Practical, No-BS Advice From a Parent
The melted brie on my croissant was congealing by the time Lila locked her phone and leaned across the brunch table, voice dropped like she was sharing a secret she shouldn’t. “Should I wait to get pregnant after our two trips this year?” She tapped her phone, where photos of the Cape Cod rail trail and a backcountry campsite in the Adirondacks glowed on the screen. She and her husband have been trying for a baby for a year, and they booked both trips before they started trying. Now that they’ve gotten the go-ahead to start trying after a round of pre-conception blood work, she can’t stop going back and forth.
Everyone has an opinion, she says. Her mom keeps telling her to stop putting off life for “a couple of trips.” Her sister-in-law, who had unplanned fertility struggles, says any delay is reckless. I just nod, because I’ve been here. Five years ago, my husband and I had a two-week trip to Portugal booked three months out, and a destination wedding in Jamaica two months after that. We’d just decided we were ready to start trying, and I spent three nights crying into takeout fried rice on our couch, torn. My best friend told me I was being selfish for prioritizing pastries and a beach trip over starting our family. My mom asked if I was sure I even wanted a kid if I was that eager to run off and vacation instead.
What I did was wait. We went on both trips. I ate three pastéis de nata every morning, all made with unpasteurized egg that I would have had to skip if I was pregnant. We hiked a 7-mile cliffside trail outside Lisbon that ended at a tiny cove where we swam in water so cold it made our lungs burn. At the wedding in Jamaica, I danced until 1 a.m. and drank two glasses of rum punch without calculating how long I needed to wait before it was safe for a fetus. I didn’t have to schedule every day around prenatal appointments or nap through half the vacation because first-trimester exhaustion knocked me out. When we got home, I got pregnant the next month.
I don’t tell Lila that to convince her to wait, or to convince her not to. I tell her that the answer isn’t the same for everyone, and there are three concrete things you can actually ask yourself instead of scrolling through TikTok comments telling you you’re either a bad mom for waiting or a bad mom for not waiting.
First, get actual facts about your own fertility, not anecdotes from people you know. If you’re under 35 and have no known fertility issues, waiting 6 to 12 months for a couple of trips doesn’t move the needle on your chances of having a healthy baby. If you’re over 35, or you’ve had miscarriages before, or you have a condition like PCOS that affects fertility, that’s a different story. Go ask your doctor, not your Facebook group. Write down your actual timeline, and ask them point blank what the actual risk of waiting that long is for you. That’s way more useful than any opinion from your aunt who had her kids at 22 and thinks anyone who waits is crazy.
Second, be honest about what these trips actually are. If your two vacations are a long weekend at a lake house where you’ll sit on the porch and grill, you can absolutely enjoy that pregnant, even early on. If it’s a once-in-a-lifetime backpacking trip you’ve been training for for a year, or a trip to a country where you’d have limited access to prenatal care if something went wrong, or that multi-day bike ride you booked three years ago that can’t be rescheduled until 2027, that’s different. Lila’s Cape Cod bike ride is 50 miles, something she’s been training for every weekend since January. If she gets pregnant now, she’ll be 12 weeks along by the time the ride rolls around, and there’s a good chance she’ll be too tired or nauseous to finish. There’s no shame in not wanting to throw away a year of training for a ride that matters to her.
Third, ask yourself what you’d regret more. That’s the question that finally sorted me out five years ago. I sat down and thought: If I wait, and we have trouble getting pregnant after, will I regret skipping these trips to try earlier? Or will I regret going on the trips and waiting? For me, the answer was I’d regret never going. I knew I’d always have that little what-if in the back of my head when we talked about our early years as a couple, what it would have been like to have that uncomplicated time before baby. For my sister-in-law, the answer was the opposite. She got pregnant two weeks before her honeymoon, and she says she never once regretted it. She loved being able to tell people she was pregnant on her trip, and she was happy just sitting on the beach eating mango every day. It works for her, and that’s that.
Last week, Lila texted me a photo of a positive pregnancy test, taken a week after she got home from the Adirondacks. She finished the 50-mile bike ride, she said, ate a whole jar of homemade pickles from a farm stand along the route that would have been off-limits if she’d been pregnant, and slept in a tent without complaining. She said she doesn’t have that little niggling what-if in the back of her head now that she’s starting this next chapter.
There’s no perfect answer to this question, and no outcome is guaranteed. Some people wait and have trouble conceiving, some people don’t wait and end up miserable on their trips, and some people have whatever outcome they never expected. All you can do is sort through the noise of everyone else’s opinions, get the facts that apply to you, and pick the choice that doesn’t leave you wondering what if. That’s about as good as it gets, right?
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