Travelling from Canada to U.S. while pregnant

August 20, 2016 6:29 PM

My wife and I are planning to travel from Ontario, Canada to Seattle this coming week. My wife is 6 months pregnant and she's heard some things about needing documentation about being insured for pregnancy related health issues and that if she doesn't have such documentation, she could be turned away at the U.S. Customs check. Does anyone know if this is true or not? What kind of documentation does she need to bring with her?
posted by Proginoskes to Travel & Transportation (4 answers total)

This might help.
posted by HuronBob at 6:53 PM on August 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'm a US expat living in a place with national health care, and thus don't have Obamacare. I went to the US at 5mo pregnant and took out travel insurance that covered the pregnancy/baby, as I've interacted with US health insurance companies enough to dread it. Required or not, it's not a bad idea, and less than the medical bills you'll have anything goes wonky. The only company I could find that includes pregnancy is Columbus Direct. Can't comment on them, as I didn't have to use it, but it ticked the box.
posted by jrobin276 at 7:55 PM on August 20, 2016

I travelled internationally at 28 weeks and brought a letter from my midwife saying I was ok to fly. This turned out to be useful, because when I went to check in at the ticket counter in Switzerland, the ticket agent was not happy that I was trying to fly and didn't really think I should. I showed her the letter, she frowned, consulted a big binder of rules, frowned some more, consulted the big binder with a colleague...eventually I was allowed to get my boarding pass. (This was a bit over 11 years ago; the baby in question just had her 11th birthday party yesterday!)

(And of course, being Switzerland, if I'd had to stay until the baby was born, she wouldn't even have gotten dual citizenship out of the whole nonsense!)

When we traveled from the states to Slovenia and Mexico last year, I asked our benefits person at work to write a letter saying we were insured. That seemed to mollify the bureaucrats in Slovenia. Maybe something like that wouldn't hurt here.
posted by leahwrenn at 8:38 PM on August 20, 2016

I've been pregnant three times and traveled from Mexico to the US several times, by car and by airplane and I've never heard of needing any documents at all except for the regular passport/visa stuff. I do always ask my dr to give me a letter stating that I'm medically ok to fly.
posted by CrazyLemonade at 10:08 PM on August 20, 2016