This essay integrates queer, anti-Blackness, Indigenous, and psychoanalytic theories of temporality to explore fetal personhood. It is argued that fetal personhood reflects a form of temporally-based affect regulation in which the fetus represents the promise and vulnerability of a tenuous future, rendering the uterus the only environment lawmakers seem to protect. In the face of the climate crisis, displacing promise and annihilation anxieties onto fetuses is a dangerous temporal system of affect regulation targeting BIPOC bodies with uteruses; a literal scorched-earth strategy designed to defend and buttress white, heteropatriarchal human exceptionalism, through a violent deployment of time.