Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Few Vacations? What I Learned Delaying Pregnancy for Travel
The oat latte in front of Lila is sweating through its paper sleeve, and she’s twisting her engagement ring so hard I keep waiting for it to snap. We’re here because she’s carrying the same question I carried three years ago: should she hit pause on trying to get pregnant to take the two big trips she and her husband have spent three years saving for?
Lila just got back from their Bali honeymoon, with Patagonia and Greece trips already booked for the next 12 months. Her dad’s side of the family has a history of early menopause, and her mom keeps leaving fertility thinkpieces in her Facebook messages, saying “you can travel when the kids are grown.” Lila says “I see my sister with two under three, she hasn’t slept through the night in four years. I know that’s worth it, but I want this time first, just me and him. What if I spend the rest of my life wishing I’d done these trips before the noise of kids started?”
I get that. I was 31 when I was in her spot. All my college roommates were posting birth announcements, my coworker threw me a pre-baby shower before I was even pregnant just to “get ahead of it.” Me and my husband had booked cherry blossom season in Japan, then a two-week road trip around Nova Scotia, where my grandma was born. We’d mapped both out on a crumpled bar napkin on our first date, drunk on cheap pinot noir. We decided to wait, go on the trips, start trying after. I got pregnant three months after we got home.
But it’s not that simple, of course. I’ve seen it go the other way too. My friend Sarah waited five years for four big international trips, got to 36, and it took three years and two rounds of IVF to have her first kid. She doesn’t regret the trips, but she says she wishes she’d gotten checked out earlier, known what her fertility looked like before she booked the fourth one. My other friend Jenna got pregnant two months after her wedding, canceled her big European trip to save for the nursery, and that annotated Rick Steves guidebook still sits on her shelf, five years later. She says she doesn’t regret her son, but some nights she stares at that book and wonders what it would have been like.
When Lila asked me what I’d tell her to do, I didn’t give her some vague “follow your heart” line. I gave her the three concrete things I wish someone had told me back when I was lying awake at night panicking about my choice.
First, go get a preconception checkup before you decide anything. Don’t just guess based on what your aunt went through or what a TikTok creator said. If you have any family history of fertility issues, ask for basic testing—it’s quick, covered by most insurance, and it gives you actual facts instead of just endless anxiety. If your doctor says you have no red flags, then waiting 12 or 18 months for trips you’ve been planning for years isn’t some reckless choice. If they do flag something, you can adjust: do the long weekend trip to the coast this year, postpone Patagonia until your kid is a toddler, or cut the big trip from two weeks to one. No decision is permanent, but knowing what you’re working with takes a lot of the fear out of it.
Second, if you do decide to wait, don’t hit pause on all the small prep work. Keep taking your prenatal vitamin every day. It’s ten dollars a month, takes two seconds after breakfast, and if you get pregnant accidentally or decide to move up your timeline, you’re already covered. Cut back on excessive drinking or quit smoking if you’re planning to get pregnant eventually anyway. That doesn’t mean you can’t have a glass of wine on the beach in Santorini—it just means you’re not making big changes that set you back later. It’s low effort, no big life overhaul, and it keeps you ready no matter what happens.
Third, check in with each other every time you book a new trip. Don’t let “wait for one more vacation” turn into waiting five years without talking about it. Sit down for 15 minutes over takeout once a year, and just ask: do we still want to wait, or do we want to start trying before the next trip? It’s easy to get caught up in the next fun adventure, but putting a loose timeline on it keeps you from looking up and realizing you’ve waited longer than you meant to.
We walked to the bus stop after coffee, and Lila pulled out her phone to schedule the preconception appointment right there, standing next to the bike rack. She still hasn’t decided if she’ll move the Patagonia trip if the doctor says anything off, but she said it’s better to know than to worry about it every night.
I have a two year old now, and we did a tiny camping trip last month that was equal parts fun and chaos: she covered herself in mud, we forgot the sleeping bags, we ate cold hot dogs for dinner. It was great, but I still pull up my photos from Japan sometimes, the ones of me and my husband eating ramen at 10pm, walking along the river with cherry blossoms falling all around us, no alarms, no diapers, just us. I’m so glad we waited.
That doesn’t mean it’s the right choice for everyone. I know people it worked for, and people it didn’t. All you can do is get the facts, know what you’ll regret more, and go from there. There’s no perfect answer, just the one that fits you right now.
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