In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, many US private employers enacted foetal protection policies that barred women - that is, women who had not been surgically sterilised - from working in jobs that might expose foetuses to toxins. This text analyses these policies and the ambiguous responses to them by federal and state courts, legislatures, administrative agencies, litigants and interest groups. It poses provocative questions about the implicit links between social welfare concerns and paternalism in the workplace: are women workers or wombs?