Should I wait to get pregnant after having a couple of vacations? What to consider before you start trying
Last Tuesday, my friend Lila showed up at my back door with a gas station coffee and a stack of folded travel itineraries, after dropping her dog off at her mom’s house for the night. My 7-year-old was still picking pepperoni off a half-eaten slice of pizza at the kitchen table, and my 4-year-old was hiding under the table tugging at my sock cuffs, so we didn’t get an uninterrupted minute until after both kids were asleep in their bunk beds. Then Lila leaned forward, tapped her calendar screen marked with Bali in March and Portugal in October, and asked the question she’d been dancing around for weeks: “Am I being stupid for waiting almost two years to get pregnant just to take these trips?”
I’ve been in this exact spot. Five years ago, when I was deciding whether to start trying for my second kid, we already had a non-refundable two-week cross-country road trip booked. My sister was living in Oregon, we hadn’t seen her in three years, and my husband and I had both just pulled three years of back-to-back 50-hour work weeks to pay off our first mortgage. My mom kept mentioning my age (I was 33 then) and how fertility drops after 30, and a coworker even pulled me aside to tell me I was risking everything for a vacation. I ended up waiting, just like Lila is thinking about doing.
Lila’s gotten the same unsolicited advice. Her aunt brought it up at Thanksgiving, saying “You don’t want to wait until it’s too late just to lay on a beach.” People in her online trying-to-conceive group have told her she’s being selfish for putting travel above having a baby. Her husband is fine either way, but he’s made it clear he’s desperate for a break from the endless cycle of work and chores that’s taken over their lives for the past four years.
When I was stressing about my own decision, I went to my OB and asked her straight up what the data said. She told me that for most people under 35 with no pre-existing fertility issues, waiting one to two years for travel doesn’t meaningfully change your overall odds of having a baby. If you’re over 35, or you already know you have PCOS, endometriosis, or other factors that affect fertility, that’s a different story—waiting may not be the right call, and your doctor can help you weigh the tradeoffs. But for low-risk people, the fear mongering about waiting a little is usually overblown. That’s the first concrete step I told Lila to take: go get a pre-conception checkup before you decide. Ask for basic fertility testing, so you’re not going off your cousin’s experience or what you read in a viral Facebook post. It costs almost nothing with most insurance, and it takes a lot of the guesswork out of the decision.
Lila went, got her tests done, and her doctor said her numbers look great, no red flags. That took a lot of the weight off, but she still worries about what if it takes longer than we expect. I get that. When I started trying after my road trip, it took eight months for me to get pregnant, and I spent most of those months panicking that I’d messed up. But my doctor reminded me that eight months is still well within the range of normal for people in their 30s. And I had that trip to fall back on when I was stressed about the two-week waits between pregnancy tests. We looked through our photos, talked about the funny wrong turns we took, and it made the waiting easier.
Another thing I tell people thinking about this is that you don’t have to make it an all-or-nothing choice. A lot of people book their trips a year or more in advance, and end up starting trying in the meantime. If you get pregnant faster than you expected, you don’t have to cancel. Just check with your doctor that your destination is safe, and spend the extra $20 to $40 on flexible travel insurance that covers pregnancy-related cancellations or medical issues. Most people don’t know that standard travel insurance often doesn’t cover that, but adding it is cheap, and it gives you a safety net if things don’t go to plan. When Lila and her husband booked their trips, they added that insurance, and they decided they won’t prevent pregnancy while they’re waiting. If it happens before the second trip, they’ll just adjust the itinerary. Instead of hiking 100 miles of the Camino, they’ll do a shorter section, or stay in a coastal town and relax. It doesn’t ruin the trip, it just changes it.
I think what a lot of people don’t talk about is how much those pre-baby trips set you up for the hard parts of new parenthood. After I had my first kid, I spent a lot of the first year resenting that my husband and I never got that last big break before we became parents. We jumped straight from working nonstop to being on call 24/7 for a newborn, and we had no shared recent memories that were just ours, no time to recharge. When we had our second after the road trip, we were both so much more rested, so much more ready to handle the sleep deprivation and the stress. That’s not something that comes up in most fertility advice columns, but it matters just as much for most people.
Last night, Lila sent me a photo of her and her husband at a local travel shop, leaning against a shelf of tattered guidebooks, holding up the Bali guide grinning. She texted, “Still scared, but still excited.” I texted back that I still pull out my road trip photos when I’m having a bad day with the kids—photos of us covered in red dust at the Grand Canyon, eating blueberry pie at a roadside stand, my husband napping in the backseat with his hat over his face. Those 14 days didn’t cost me my second baby, and they’re still there when I need a minute to remember who we were before we were just mom and dad. There’s no perfect answer to this question, no outcome that’s guaranteed to go the way you plan. But for what it’s worth, choosing to take the time to make those memories doesn’t make you selfish or foolish. It just makes you human.
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