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In contemporary discourses of motherhood, there is much emphasis on women as ‘incubators of the future’. This inscription of the woman as a uterus is manifest in exhortations of how pregnant and pre-pregnant women should behave to ensure an ideal environment for the foetus. The uterus/woman is responsible for the potential environmental ills that might be experienced, gliding over the impact of racism, poverty, and violence. Dominant ideas about this ideal environment in which young model citizens/embryos can be nurtured are highly gendered and individualised and are perniciously filtering into social policies and social work itself. Knowledges such as neuroscience and epigenetics have recently been (largely) uncritically adopted in human development teaching, grounded in the neoliberal social policy project of intervention to prevent future harms (and liability). We argue for problematising the …