Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After Taking a Couple of Vacations? A Parent’s Honest Take
Last month, my best friend Mia curled into the wicker chair on my back deck, picking at a leftover al pastor taco, and flipped through photos of her upcoming Portugal itinerary on her phone. The string lights above us flickered, a mosquito kept dive-bombing the bowl of guac, and she looked up mid-scroll and asked the question she’d been dancing around for an hour: “Should I really wait to get pregnant until after we do both this and the ski trip in January? Everyone keeps saying we’re being silly putting it off.”
I asked the exact same question seven years ago. My husband and I got married, booked a two-week trip to Iceland three months later, then extended a family wedding trip in New Orleans into a week-long vacation just for us. Every other week, someone would pull me aside and ask when we were going to start trying, why we were “wasting time” on trips when I was already 31. I remember standing in the cheese aisle at the grocery store one day, and my mom’s friend asked if we were ever going to stop “playing at being newlyweds” and start a family. I left the store with milk and no cheese, because I was too frazzled to remember what I came for.
We ended up waiting 18 months after our wedding to start trying. We took both trips, got lost on a backcountry hike in Iceland that I thought would ruin our whole itinerary, ended up sleeping in our rental car next to a random waterfall because it got dark too fast, and woke up to the Northern Lights painting the sky above us. We never would have had that moment if we’d been rushing to get pregnant before the trip, or pregnant already and worrying about keeping a first-trimester pregnancy safe at 10,000 feet. That unplanned, messy quiet is something I still think about when our 5-year-old is yelling for snacks while we’re trying to eat dinner out.
A lot of the advice you see online about this question is all or nothing. One side says “babies travel great, you don’t need to go anywhere before you have them, stop being selfish”. The other says “you’ll never travel again so go everywhere right now”. Both are wrong, because this isn’t a universal question—it’s your question. No one else’s priorities fit your life.
The first thing I told Mia is that if you don’t have pre-existing fertility concerns, waiting 6 to 12 months for two vacations isn’t going to change the outcome for most healthy people. Of course, check with your doctor first if you’re worried—if you’re over 35 or have a history of irregular periods or other health concerns, that changes the calculation. But for most people, that short wait isn’t a big medical risk. I’ve seen too many people cancel non-refundable trips they’ve been planning for years just because their aunt said they should hurry up, and that’s a shame.
I didn’t just give Mia vague encouragement, though. I walked her through three small, concrete things she can do to work through the decision for herself, instead of letting other people call the shots. First, if you already booked and paid for the trips, don’t cancel them just to please other people. Unless your doctor says waiting is a clear risk, keep them. There’s no prize for starting parenthood earlier than you wanted to. Second, when you go, don’t spend the whole trip stressing about getting pregnant when you get home. Order the extra pastries, sleep in until 10 a.m., skip the tourist attraction you don’t actually care about just to sit on a beach and watch the waves. That unstructured, just-the-two-of-you time is the whole point of going before you have kids, because once you do, unstructured time is a rare thing. Third, if you’re still on the fence, grab a piece of notebook paper and write two short lists. One list is what you gain by waiting for the trips. One is what you gain by getting pregnant now. Don’t let anyone else’s priorities end up on your lists. For me, the gain of waiting was getting that time with my husband that I can’t get back. Travel with kids is fun, but it’s completely different—it’s not better or worse, it’s just different, and I’m glad I got to experience both versions.
I know people who got pregnant right before their big trip, went anyway, and it was totally fine. I know people who got pregnant right after marriage, skipped the big trip, and they’re happy too. This isn’t a “if you don’t do this you’ll regret it forever” thing. But I’ve also seen the small, quiet regrets that stick. My aunt got pregnant six months after her wedding, never took that big trip to Italy she and my uncle had saved for, and 40 years later, she still mentions it when we talk about family trips. It’s not that she can’t go now—she goes every other year—it’s that she never got that trip when it was just the two of them, figuring out life together before they became mom and dad. That small unmet expectation sticks, even when everything else goes right.
Mia packed her suitcase last week for Portugal. I texted her to send me photos of the pasteis de nata, and I haven’t heard back yet. I’m assuming she’s too busy eating them and wandering the cobblestone streets to check her phone, which is exactly what she should be doing. If she gets home and starts trying and gets pregnant the first month, great. If it takes a little longer, that’s fine too. No one can tell you the “right” answer to this question, because it’s your timeline. Right now, that’s enough.
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