Summary: I describe an approximate formula for calculating the short-term probability of loss of a sequence under the neutral Wright-Fisher model with recombination. I also present an upper and lower bound for this probability. Exact analytical calculation of this quantity is difficult and computationally expensive because the number of different ways in which a sequence can be lost grows very large in the presence of recombination. Simulations indicate that the probabilities obtained using my approximation are always comparable to the true expectations provided that the number of generations remains small. These results are useful in the context of an algorithm that we recently developed for simulating Wright-Fisher populations forward in time.