'CONCEPTIONMOONS': Betting on the Stork
Couples trying for a baby vote Las Vegas as favorite city to attempt to conceive

What happens in Vegas ... may end up leading to pregnancy.

According to a new survey by babycenter.com, fertility-challenged couples rank Las Vegas as their favorite city in which to deliberately procreate. The parenting Web site calls these trips "conceptionmoons" and claims they're remarkably effective.

"From our message boards, we noticed people were taking these vacations to kick back and relax with the hope of getting pregnant," says babycenter.com editor-in-chief Linda Murray.

In August, Murray commissioned a survey (sponsored by Clear Blue Easy ovulation test strips) of 1,052 babycenter.com members identifying themselves as women with fertility issues. More than 75 percent said they had taken a conceptionmoon with their mate.

"When we tried to extrapolate this to the general audience, we felt like it was 10 percent," says Murray, who estimates as many as 300,000 couples may be conceptionmooning each year.

Even more remarkable, 40 percent of respondents who took conceptionmoons reported getting pregnant.

"This is an astounding number," Murray says. (The success rate in the general population is 20-25 percent during any given menstrual cycle, according to the National Women's Health Resource Center.)

The travel industry is already seeing dollar signs. Starwood Resorts advertises what it calls "procreation vacations" at its Martineau Bay, Westin Grand Bahama Island at Our Lucaya and Westin St. John resorts. These three-night packages -- which include unlimited quantities of pumpkin soup for her and "sea moss elixir" for him -- run $1,893-$3,427 per couple. For about $1,800, couples can take a "conception cruise" with Singapore fertility guru Dr. Wei Siang Yu -- or, for $100 more, a procreation ski vacation at the Teton Mountain Lodge in Jackson Hole, Wyo.

"We're seeing more and more resorts creating special packages specifically geared towards this," says Nina Willdorf, senior editor of Travel + Leisure magazine. "There's a knowing sense of humor to it, and it's a fun thing to do."

Currently, Las Vegas resorts do not specifically offer conceptionmoon packages. But that doesn't stop baby-minded couples from conceiving of their own. While the beaches of Hawaii and Florida were the top overall conception destinations for babycenter.com readers, the top city was Las Vegas. They cited it is as the best place to "go out for dinner, relax and have fun," Murray says -- at least whenever they had time to come up for air.

"That makes perfect sense," says Las Vegas Convention and Visitor Authority spokeswoman Erika Pope. "Las Vegas offers the perfect occasion to set the proper mood. There are so many romantic dates you can go on.

"We're happy they're coming here."

Jack Waiss, now 6, is the result of a conceptionmoon taken by San Franciscans Kelley Waiss and her husband, Vincent, at Mandalay Bay in February 2000, after a year of unsuccessful conception attempts.

"The premise was getting out of our day-to-day routine, being in a place that's all about fun, and having time to reconnect as a couple," says Kelley, a 37-year-old communications consultant. "There is a lot of pressure today to have a baby in your first try. And the older we get, the odds are against us.

"There's something about taking that pressure off -- where your husband has less pressure to perform and you have less pressure to lead the process -- so it happens naturally."

Infertility is on the upswing as Americans reproduce later in life.

"These days, more women are getting pregnant in their 30s," says Dr. Said Daneshmand of Fertility Center of Las Vegas, "whereas 30 or 40 years ago, more women got pregnant in their 20s. And fertility declines with age -- both in men and women."

According to Daneshmand, 15 percent of women trying to get pregnant today encounter difficulty. However, he remains unconvinced that the conceptionmoon is as much a medical tool as a marketing one.

"Day-to-day stress has zero impact on fertility," he says. "There have been many studies looking at fertility rates during periods of war, when a population is under a tremendous amount of stress, and fertility rates do not change."

Only frequency of intercourse has a bearing on bearing, according to Daneshman.

"And only to a limited degree, because it's got to be during ovulation," he says. (Murray says her survey's respondents all timed their conceptionmoons to their ovulation schedule.)

Either way, Daneshman does not believe that babycenter.com's survey is scientifically useful.

"Surveys are not very sensitive indicators of whether a particular process is going to work," he says. "If you were going to find out if conceptionmoons really had an effect on fertility, you would design a study with 200 patients, all of whom have been trying for more than a year to get pregnant without success. Half would go on this conceptionmoon. And after one year of following these patients, you'd look at what percentage of each group got pregnant."

Murray concedes that her survey wasn't a double-blind medical study.

"It was a survey of our audience of things that they said helped or hurt them in terms of their desire to have a baby," she says. "And of the women who went on conceptionmoons, they reported that stress was a significant issue on their lives."

Daneshman says he's not opposed to couples taking a vacation to try and conceive.

"It rejuvenates your mind and re-energizes you," he says, "but I think you have to be very careful in drawing conclusions from these kinds of surveys.

"I just don't want patients to draw conclusions that the treatment for all infertility is just to take a vacation."

The original article can be found here.