Should I wait to get pregnant after a couple of pre-baby vacations? What to consider
Last month, I sat across from my friend Lila at the sticky corner table of our neighborhood coffee shop, where a group of preschoolers was dropping Goldfish crackers all over the floor near the window. She stirred her oat latte half a dozen times before sliding her phone across the table, two screenshots pulled up: one for a beach cottage she and her partner booked for September in the Outer Banks, another for a long weekend in a mountain cabin for November. “We’ve been talking about starting to try for a baby for a year,” she said. “But these trips have been planned since 2022, after we closed on our house. Should I wait to get pregnant after we go?”
I’d been in that exact spot four years earlier, when my husband and I had a two-week trip to Portugal booked that we’d saved for since we got married. I was 32, and every other person in my office and extended family had an opinion. A coworker pulled me aside after a meeting to tell me I was being reckless, that fertility drops off sharply after 30 and I’d regret waiting. My mom sent me three different articles about advanced maternal age in one week. My cousin, who had her first kid at 28, kept saying we should just go for a long weekend at the lake instead of putting off starting a family for two weeks in Europe.
I ended up waiting. We went to Portugal, hiked 10 miles a day along the cliffs of the Algarve, got lost in the narrow streets of Alfama at dusk, ate a pastel de nata at every bakery we passed, slept in until 9am every single day. No nap schedules to hit, no diaper bags to pack, no one needing us to stop every 20 minutes for a snack or a potty break. We came home, went off birth control, and got pregnant three months later. My son is three now, and we’ve taken plenty of family trips since, but none of them feel like that trip—just two people who only had to worry about what they wanted to do next.
I’ve seen this question pop up every week in the parenting groups I follow, and it always splits into two unhelpful camps: one side says any delay is selfish and reckless, especially if you’re over 30, and the other side says you must check every trip off your list before your life ends forever once you have a kid. Neither is true, of course. What I’ve learned from talking to friends and my own doctor is that it all comes down to three concrete, personal questions you can ask yourself instead of listening to the noise.
First, how long are you waiting, and what’s your actual fertility context? I always tell people to book a 15-minute pre-conception checkup with your ob-gyn before you decide. Ask them straight up: given my age, health history, and any known fertility issues I have, will waiting X number of months for these trips meaningfully change my odds of having a healthy baby? For Lila, she’s 31, healthy, no known issues, waiting four months. My doctor told me the same thing when I asked—four months isn’t going to move the needle one way or the other for most people in that position. But if you’re 36, you’ve already been trying for a year, and you know you have PCOS, waiting another 12 months for two more big trips is a different call. That’s not me saying you can’t go, it just means you need to talk to a specialist about your options before you put things off. I have a friend who did that, and she ended up doing a round of IUI right before her trip, it worked, and she adjusted her itinerary to be more low-key and had a great time. You don’t have to pick all or nothing.
Second, how flexible are your plans? Check your trip insurance: most standard policies will cover cancellation if you get pregnant before you leave and need to reschedule, as long as you booked the trip before you stopped using birth control. If you can’t get a refund, can you transfer the booking to someone else, or adjust what you’re doing on the trip? If you booked a backpacking trip through Costa Rica and find out you’re pregnant at 6 weeks, you can switch to sitting on the beach and reading books, right? If that’s not a big deal to you, you don’t even have to fully wait to start trying—you can just start and see what happens, adjusting as you go. That’s what my sister did, she got pregnant two weeks before her honeymoon, she just swapped the scuba diving for snorkeling in shallow water, skipped the cocktails, and still had a great time.
Third, what’s your actual reason for waiting? Are you waiting because you have two trips already booked and paid for that you’ve spent years saving for, and you don’t want to spend your whole first trimester miserable on a plane when you could go now and enjoy it? That’s a great reason. Are you waiting because you’re scared of being a parent, and you keep adding one more trip, one more goal, one more thing to check off before you start, and it’s been three years of putting it off? That’s a different thing to work through, separate from the trips themselves. I have a friend who fell into that pattern: she and her husband kept planning one more big trip every time they talked about starting, and by the time they decided to try, she was 38 and needed IVF to get pregnant. She still says the trips were worth it, but she wishes she’d been honest with herself earlier about how much her fear of parenthood was pushing the delay.
Lila left the coffee shop that day saying she was going to book that pre-conception appointment first. She went on both trips this fall, posted photos of her and her partner at the beach, covered in sand, drinking margaritas at sunset, and then hiking through fallen leaves in the mountains with their golden retriever. She texted me last week saying they stopped using birth control right after they got home. We don’t know if it’ll happen next month, or if it’ll take a year, or if there will be complications no one can predict right now. But she said the little nagging voice that kept saying “I wish we’d gotten to go” is gone. That’s more than most of us can ask for, when you’re making any big decision about starting a family.
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