Chronopaternalism: Reproductive Justice and the Governance of Futures in France's 'First 1000 Days'

Contemporary perinatal policies across Europe increasingly target the ‘first 1000 days of life’ (conception to age two) as a critical ‘window of opportunity’ for maximising developmental potential and reducing future inequalities. This paper argues these policies enact a specific mode of reproductive governance: chronopaternalism, which fuses the temporal rationalities of prevention with the moral authority of paternalism. In doing so, they construct reproduction as an anticipatory moral duty, exhorting parents – especially mothers – to live in and for the future, tasking them with caring for children as the bearers of collective wellbeing. Drawing on a reproductive justice (RJ) framework, the paper situates this temporal moralisation within the broader politics of who is afforded the capacity to parent in dignity. The RJ lens highlights how such policies, while ostensibly universal, disproportionately scrutinise the parenting practices of classed, racialised, and migrant women. We argue that chronopaternalism temporalizes these structural inequalities: rather than addressing systemic inequities (eg., poverty, poor housing) through redistributive action in the present, it projects them into the future as matters of individual parental responsibility and risk management. Using critical discourse analysis of France’s 1000 Premiers Jours (First Thousand Days) policy and its government-sponsored app, the study identifies how official discourse establishes nested ‘timeframes’ that govern parenthood. Through sequential injunctions to ‘prepare’ (preconception), ‘optimise’ (pregnancy), and ‘prevent’ (early childhood), these policies constitute parents as temporal subjects whose moral worth is tied to their ability to manage risk. The child – often not yet born – emerges as the primary ‘object at risk’, while the state, legitimised by scientific expertise on brain development, assumes the role of a benevolent yet disciplinary caretaker of the family’s time. In bringing reproductive justice into dialogue with theories of social time and anticipatory governance, this paper demonstrates how reproductive politics in liberal democracies extend beyond control over bodies to the governance of futures, where protection, prevention, and inequality management converge in the moral language of care.