Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations? What No One Tells You
The crumbs of blueberry scone stuck to my paper napkin as Lila leaned across the wobbly brunch table, voice dropping like she was sharing a state secret. “I don’t know if we should push our trying timeline back another six months. We booked the Amalfi trip for fall, and then my sister’s destination wedding in Cabo next spring. Is it crazy to wait to get pregnant until after both?”
I recognized the tightness around her eyes. Four years ago, I was sitting right where she was. My husband and I had scraped together for two years to book a two-week Pacific Northwest road trip that summer, and my aunt had already paid for our spot on a group trip to Tokyo the following spring. At my pre-conception checkup, my OB casually mentioned that it can take up to a year to conceive for most couples, so it’s best to start sooner rather than later. My mom called every other week to hint that I was “wasting my good fertility” by putting it off for trips. For two months, I toggled between guilt over being selfish and resentment at the idea of canceling the trips we’d worked so hard for. We ended up deciding to wait, and I got pregnant three months after we got home from Japan.
I still think about that road trip, when we woke up at 5am to hike the Skyline Trail at Mount Rainier, ate so much salmon chowder we were sick by the end of the week, and slept in a drafty cabin where we had to layer three sweaters to stay warm. I got a blistering sunburn on my shoulders, drank a whole bottle of pinot noir at a waterfront winery, and stayed up until 2am playing cribbage because there was no cell service and nothing else to do. If I’d been pregnant that trip, I probably could have done most of it, but it wouldn’t have been the same. I would have spent half the hike worrying about overexerting myself, turned down the wine, and spent every meal picking apart the menu to avoid listeria. That trip was for the two of us, before we became a family of three, and I don’t regret waiting a single day to have that.
The truth is, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer to this question, but I can share what I wish someone had told me before I spent all those nights lying awake worrying about it. The first thing I tell people in Lila’s position is to pull out your calendar and map it out, not just in your head. Write down how far along you’d be for each vacation if you started trying next month, and then write down what you actually planned to do on that trip. For Lila, the Amalfi trip centers around a 5-mile hike along the Path of the Gods, eating every kind of fresh cheese and street pasta she can find, and drinking limoncello with the locals every night. If she got pregnant next week, she’d be 5 months along for the trip, and all those plans would have to change. That’s not a bad thing for everyone, but for her, that trip was the reward for five years of working 60-hour weeks to pay off student loans. It’s okay to want the trip you planned, not a modified version of it.
The second concrete thing to do is check your travel insurance and the destination’s healthcare access before you decide. Most standard travel insurance plans stop covering pregnancy-related complications after 24 weeks, and many won’t cover emergency care for pregnant people in remote areas. If you’re planning a trip to a region where malaria or other vaccine-preventable diseases are a risk, those medications aren’t recommended for pregnant people, anyway. That’s not a dealbreaker, but it’s a practical thing to know before you decide to try while you’re planning trips.
If you’re over 30 and worried about waiting six months to a year, book a pre-conception fertility workup before you make a final call. It’s just a simple blood test and an ultrasound, and it can tell you if you have any underlying factors that mean you should start trying sooner. For most healthy people in their late 20s and early 30s, waiting a year doesn’t change your odds of conceiving that much, but knowing where you stand takes the guesswork and the guilt out of the decision. When Lila and I left brunch, she booked the appointment for the next week.
There’s still no guarantee, of course. We could wait and end up dealing with fertility issues we didn’t expect. We could start trying tomorrow and get pregnant on the first try, and have a perfectly lovely vacation anyway. No one can predict how it will go. But I’ve noticed that most of the people who tell you you shouldn’t wait never took the time to save up for the kind of trips you’re planning. They don’t remember what it’s like to have that unpressured time with just your partner, before you have a baby to worry about 24/7.
I don’t think waiting makes you selfish, and I don’t think starting right away makes you reckless. It’s just a personal choice that depends on what matters most to you right now. Last week, Lila texted me a screenshot of her Amalfi boat tour confirmation. She got her workup results back, everything looks normal, and she’s keeping the timeline the way she wanted it. The knot in her stomach is gone, for now. Whatever happens later, that’s enough right now.
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