Yes, pregnant women can purchase life insurance during the first two trimesters of the pregnancy. With certain carriers, expecting mothers can get preferred ratings, if they haven’t had any complications. The two most common types of complications are gestational diabetes, or pregnancy-induced diabetes, and gestational high blood pressure. Women with these conditions during pregnancy will have a hard time getting insured.
For example, I recently helped a pregnant mother with minimal gestational diabetes. We put it out to bid to all the carriers. We got a decline from everyone except one carrier, who offered standard table 4. Everyone else said we would have to wait until 6-8 weeks after the baby’s birth until they would offer their best rates.
4% of all pregnant women get gestational diabetes, and 8% of women will experience some high blood pressure (hypertension). But the majority of women enter pregnancy healthy and remain so until delivering the baby. Insuring these women is easy, unless they had complications with a previous pregnancy. In this case, most carriers will not make an offer of life insurance to the prospective buyer. Previous complications that make a pregnant woman uninsurable include gestational diabetes and high blood pressure, sometimes referred to as hypertension. A more serious progression of hypertension is preeclampsia. All these or a previous c-section or cesarean birth will prevent pregnant women from purchasing life insurance while they’re pregnant.
My recommendation… buy before any of these complications possibly develop. Gestational diabetes will not typically develop until the second trimester, but sometimes as early as 20 weeks, and the same time frame applies to gestational hypertension. Pregnant women have the best chance of getting great rates if they apply for life insurance during the first trimester.
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