‘I was causing harm’: author Helen Jukes on motherhood and our polluted bodies

When Helen Jukes told her friends she was writing about motherhood and pollution, they advised her against it and warned she might make pregnant people more anxious than they already were. But she disagreed. Mother Animal, a personal account of Jukes’ pregnancy and early years of motherhood, details her growing realisation of how contaminated her body, and her baby, have become. And it’s something she thinks all would-be parents should be more aware of. There are chemicals from human industry in breast milk, amniotic fluid and bones, she writes. Toxicologists have found “forever chemicals” in embryos and foetuses at “every stage of pregnancy … in lung tissues, in livers”. It is inescapable.

Yet it is spoken about far too little. “I find it quite disrespectful to think that mothers wouldn’t be capable of handling [this] information,” she says when we meet at her home on the edge of the Peak District.

Around the time she got pregnant, Jukes actively wanted to know what kind of world she was bringing her child into, reading, for example, David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth, about the scale of the climate crisis and how devastating its effects are and will become. But it wasn‘t until she had her daughter that she realised how much she had missed; how much pregnancy and breastfeeding manuals had left out. “I did not learn about the human studies that found that high exposure to forever chemicals was significantly related to early undesired weaning, or not initiating breastfeeding at all – or that they might be present in the makeup I applied to my skin, and the waterproof coating on my raincoat and the stain resistant fabric on my sofa,” she explains in the book.

It’s the disbelief at all she didn’t hear about that seems to drive forward her research and writing, which moves between a wild, controlled anger that is so intimately conveyed you feel you’re in it with her and an unceasing determination to understand the state of play.

Jukes says she took inspiration from Sandra Steingraber’s, ​​Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood, which looks at the environmental hazards in pregnancy, and Lucy Cooke’s Bitch: A Revolutionary Guide to Sex, Evolution and the Female Animal, which paints a picture of different animals’ sexual identities and sexualities to challenge gender stereotypes. She also spoke to a lot of different experts, including a toxicologist who just so happens to be trying to have a baby. She asks the toxicologist an inevitable question: how does she hold motherhood and pollution in her mind at the same time? Her immediate answer is that she can’t; they have to remain separate. “In asking the question, I realised that I had been looking for reassurance: it’s not as bad as you think. But it is that bad,” Jukes writes.

If you look at her setup, Jukes’ life might seem miles away from all of this. She picks me up from a small train station not far from her house. It feels remote in comparison to London, where I’ve come from. The train station is deserted, it looks as if it has not long ago rained, the air feels fresh and you can see lush greenery all around. I imagine the peace you might find living nestled among the trees. I wonder if she feels this, having moved here from Oxford and before that London (there was also a brief stint in Italy and the Welsh borders). Leaving behind her job in the third sector, now she works amid this rolling countryside as a writer and a teacher of writing. But I’m reminded when we speak not to romanticise the natural world as a place of purity. Part of the book is about showing this view of nature as a con, she says, an image that’s created by culture.

Jukes is softly spoken and carefully weighs up her answers to my questions. But her frustration is still palpable, sitting in the living room of the former worker’s cottage she lives in with her daughter. What bothers her are the misconceptions around naturalness and motherhood. “I don’t think that had really landed for me before I became pregnant and suddenly I began to find some of the images and advertisements and the discourse [around pregnancy and breastfeeding] really horrifying,” she says. If the connection between mother, baby and contamination is mentioned at all, it’s chalked up to personal responsibility: avoid cigarette smoke, eat less seafood.

Mother Animal could have easily turned into a how-to book, and it isn’t difficult to imagine how popular a guide to parenting amid the pollution might be. But Jukes knows individualism is not the answer; making the right choice, even if it were possible, she says, assumes a level of information and financial capability not available to everyone.

Being a mother is not about creating a small environment where everything is safe, calm and pure, she explains. This doesn’t exist. Take feeding your baby. There is not comprehensive global data on the likely level of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (Pfas, also referred to as forever chemicals) in different peoples’ breast milk, with studies suggesting it varies internationally and domestically. If you are in an area of high exposure, for example through contaminated drinking water, some peoples’ breastmilk can have a huge amount of toxins in it. Another recent study of Dutch infants, found a higher level of daily intake of Pfas were influenced by, among other things, exclusively breastfed babies, maternal age and if it was the mother’s first-time breastfeeding. The other feeding option, formula, has problems too. One investigation found 85 chemical compounds defined as endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs), which are chemicals that interfere with how hormones work, or suspected EDCs in different formula milks and containers, meaning individual low exposure to each substance. At the same time, polypropylene infant feeding bottles release high levels of microplastics, and it seems this increases when they’re exposed to sterilisation and high-water temperatures.

Owning up to her culpability was important for Jukes. “Yes, on the one hand I was feeling achingly kind of full of care,” she explains, “and on the other hand … I was causing harm.” She isn’t only referring to the chemical burden she was passing on to her child; she was bringing stuff into their home, throwing it in the bin and from there it was going to affect other creatures and other parts of the world too.

Nature, humans, other animals, she believes, are all intertwined. Jukes recounts taking some comfort in learning about the way other animals parent, detailing the wild complexity in how they care for their young in the book. She tells me about the caddis flies, whose larvae don’t have any parental care; they create cases for themselves out of flotsam they find in their environment. Or the Australian three-toed skink, which can have eggs and live young in the same litter. These accounts make moments of this urgent book joyful and expansive. “Who am I to say these simple creatures are not complex? The world is diverse and dynamic,” she says. “These creatures are amazing”.

But they are vulnerable too. There are pesticides in seabirds, flame retardants in humpback whales and industrial solvents in penguin eggs. Just like the pregnancy books, the research that she read about other animals parenting techniques often didn’t cover this part. “Mothering creatures evolve to fit the needs of their niche, but those niches are changing, and the extent to which the mothering creatures are able to adapt (rather than remain steady and unchanging) will be a key factor in determining which species survive into the future”, she writes.

With all that she knows, I wonder, how does she cope? How do you raise your child amid the toxicity, especially if you know you can’t control it all? She says we have to channel our energies into collective change. “We need to be writing to MPs,” she says. “We need to be making the case that these chemicals should not be circulated at all.”

By the time I get to the end of the book, it seems Jukes is not only railing against all the pollution we’ve created, she is also imagining how else we might have and raise children in this world.

In her first book A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings, a meditative, personal reflection on beekeeping, we leave Jukes as she’s falling in love. In Mother Animal, we rejoin her when she’s embarking on motherhood, we assume with the same person. But over the course of the book, she subtly indicates that their relationship has broken down. It feels like she’s searching for a light in a storm; one of which might be all the animals who show mothering can be much more flexible than we realise.

Rare though it might be in the animal world, she writes about mother lions branching off from their prides to raise offspring together and emperor penguins putting their young together in a “communal creche” when they’re out hunting. Maybe we take this variety seriously. Maybe all the responsibility need not fall on the mother. Maybe we think of raising children collectively.

Despite this tentative hope, there is one part of Mother Animal I can’t stop thinking about. Jukes speaks to a veterinary epidemiologist in Edinburgh who led a necropsy on an orca, Lulu, who came from a population where there hadn’t been any offspring in 25 years. They found that Lulu had scar-like ovaries, which prevented her from having calves, and she had a level of polychlorinated biphenyls – a group of toxic chemicals used in paints, glue and other industrial products – in her body a hundred times over what is considered safe. These orcas may go extinct within our lifetime. In a world of such toxicity, a world where the climate and our natural world is in crisis, the epidemiologist admitted to Jukes that he’d chosen not to have children.

I ask her about this; how did she feel when he said this? She explains that she respects this decision, and understands why people make it. But for her, despite all she knows, all she has learned and all she has written, she maintains that we cannot just stop. “If we do”, she says, “they’re winning”.