This paper integrates queer and psychoanalytic theories of temporality to explore the raft of new laws and resulting cases that imbue the fetus with status as a person. The laws increasingly result in women being depicted as in a liminal state of “could be pregnant,” thus, as objects of heightened medical and social surveillance. Exploring the affective dynamics of the culture, I show that fetuses embody displaced anxieties and vulnerabilities such that fetal protection functions to reinforce dissociation. It becomes clear that fetal personhood laws reflect a form of temporally-based affect regulation in which the fetus comes to embody the promise of an otherwise tenuous future. Regulation is enacted through a criminal-justice–based form of future-oriented risk management that takes poor women and women of color as its main targets.