Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations? What I Learned From My Own Choice
I was wiping Cheerio crumbs out of the cracked edge of my son’s high chair last Tuesday when my phone buzzed. It was a text from Lila, my college friend who’s been mapping out her path to parenthood for the last two years: “We just locked in Amalfi next spring and Vermont skiing in January. All my mom group texts say I’m crazy to wait, but I feel guilty even asking. Should I wait to get pregnant after these two vacations?”
I remembered exactly how that guilt felt. Five years ago, my husband and I had a two-week Japan trip booked, the one we’d saved for three years, and we’d planned to start trying for a baby as soon as we got home. Two months before departure, I took a test on a random Tuesday morning and saw two pink lines. I sat on the bathroom floor staring at it, half excited, half furious. I’d messed up the timeline, I thought. I’d waited this long for the trip, why didn’t I just wait two more months?
First-trimester sickness hit me hard, all day not just morning. I threw up twice on the bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto. I couldn’t stand the smell of the grilled yakitori stands I’d been dreaming of for years. I spent three afternoons napping on the couch of our Airbnb while my husband walked around the cherry blossom gardens alone. I cried on our last night because I missed the whole trip I’d planned. When we got home, everyone had an opinion: some said I was lucky to get pregnant so fast, I shouldn’t complain. Others said I should have waited, that I’d ruined my last big hurrah before kids.
That binary thinking is what makes this question so heavy, isn’t it? It’s either “fertility first, no delays ever” or “enjoy your freedom while you can, don’t rush into kids.” No one talks about the middle ground, the actual small, concrete things you can check to make the choice that fits you.
The first thing I told Lila is what I wish someone had told me when I was panicking over my positive test. Pull up your last OB-GYN notes in your patient portal. If your doctor has never mentioned any red flags—irregular cycles, endometriosis, low ovarian reserve, a family history of early menopause—waiting 6 to 12 months for two trips you’ve dreamed of for years doesn’t change your odds of having a baby for most people in their late 20s and early 30s. That’s not me being flippant about fertility; it’s what my own OB told me when I asked her this question after I got home from Japan. If you do have known red flags, that changes everything, and waiting is probably not the right call. But if you don’t, that 8-month wait Lila’s looking at isn’t the big risky choice everyone on social media makes it out to be.
The second thing I told her is, if you don’t want to wait to start trying, you don’t have to skip the trips anyway. Just buy travel insurance that explicitly covers cancellation for pregnancy before you start trying. Most standard policies won’t cover you if you conceive after you buy the plan, but there are several that do, and it only adds $50 to $100 to your total trip cost. If you end up pregnant and too sick to travel, you get most of your money back, and you can rebook for after the baby comes. It’s a simple, low-cost fix that no one mentions when they’re yelling at you for even considering waiting.
A year after my son was born, we took him to Costa Rica for 10 days. He was 18 months old, and we spent most of the trip playing in the sand, napping for two hours every afternoon, and wiping guacamole off his high chair tray at beachside restaurants. It wasn’t the trip I would have planned before kids, but it was fun, in a totally different way. But that doesn’t mean I don’t still want that Japan trip I planned all those years ago: the one where I stay up late drinking sake with my husband, hike a mountain, and eat 10 different kinds of sushi in one day. That trip is still waiting for me, and I’ll take it when my son is old enough that we can leave him with my parents for a week, or bring him along and he can hike it with us.
The third thing I told Lila is to ask herself if these are actually trips she can’t take later, or if she’s just waiting for the “perfect” time to have a baby. Because the perfect time never exists. If these are two trips that can only happen right now—Lila’s Amalfi trip is with her sister, who’s planning to start her own family right after and won’t be able to travel for a few years—that’s a good reason to wait. If you just keep putting off having a baby for every trip that pops up on your calendar, that’s a different story. There will always be another vacation, another wedding, another big event you want to cross off your list before you start.
Lila texted me back a few days after our conversation, said she’d looked up her last OB notes, talked to her partner, and they’re going to wait until after both trips to start trying. She said the guilt is mostly gone. I didn’t tell her everything will work out perfectly, because no one can promise that. I didn’t tell her she made the right or wrong choice, because it’s not my call.
I still look at the blurry photos I took on that Japan trip, the ones where I’m leaning against a cherry blossom tree half dead from sickness, and I think about the two different paths I could have taken. If I’d waited, I would have had that perfect trip I dreamed of, but I wouldn’t have my son a year earlier, wouldn’t have all these messy little moments with him that I wouldn’t trade for any amount of sushi. There’s no perfect answer, just the answer that fits what you care about most right now. I still haven’t booked that return trip to Japan, but I will. Someday.
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