ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how women's reproductive bodies are entangled in historical, scientific and media discourses that intimately link the behaviours and biology of mothers with harm to the fetus. The reporting on the new science of the fetal overnutrition hypothesis now extends the gendered nature of infant feeding practices to the interiority of women's bodies. Social environments have segued into intra-uterine environments, in which fat, pregnant mothers can transmit obesity on to their children and future generations. The media conflation of women's reproductive bodies with smoking guns reflects recent paradigmatic developments in scientific research about the origins of health and disease, and how adult chronic disease might be determined by the womb environment. Locating the source of high birth-weight and childhood obesity in the generative female body marks a long history of association between women's bodies and that which is considered dangerous.
