To think that there’s such a thing as a “semi-planned” pregnancy

[YankSplaining]

When I got pregnant with my first baby, my husband and I were not trying to conceive at that exact time. However, we were going to start trying to conceive in another few months.

Whenever people talk about pregnancies being planned or unplanned, I feel like neither term is really descriptive of that situation. Technically it was unplanned, but when people say they had an “unplanned pregnancy,” the connotation is that they got pregnant at a time when getting pregnant wasn’t in their imminent plans. It feels weird saying I had an “unplanned pregnancy” - like I was a teenager who wasn’t planning to get pregnant for at least ten years, or a woman in her forties who mistook her pregnancy for early menopause, or a childfree woman who was never planning to get pregnant at all.

Imperfect analogy, but let’s say it’s your birthday and you’re planning to go out in a few hours and buy yourself a birthday cake. Then your family comes in with a surprise cake. It’s not like you weren’t planning to have a birthday cake - you just weren’t planning to have one at that exact moment.

AIBU to think there’s a gray space between “planned pregnancy” and “unplanned pregnancy”?

My husband and I were using fertility awareness methods with the intention of not getting pregnant, and did it successfully for a year and a half. We always had the understanding that we ideally wanted a little time to be married with no kids, but if I got pregnant, that wasn’t a problem. Now he’s has a vasectomy.

For the record, no one’s asked me if my pregnancies were planned or not. (Especially when the kids are six and ten years old!) I just feel like when people are talking about “the devastating effects of unplanned pregnancy” or things along those lines, they’re not really talking about my situation, but it’s not really accurate to think that I had a “planned pregnancy,” either.

I see where you're coming from OP. Our DS was a surprise and not a surprise at the same time. Not a surprise because we weren't using contraception, but a total surprise because we hadn't been using contraception for over 3 years and had long since assumed it just wasn't going to happen for us (since we were 42 & 39 at the time).