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As I write this, two beetles are embracing on my leg, a crow flies past carrying a twig for its nest, and the hedgerow behind me is chattering with sparrows. The world’s diversity is waking in all its complex and extraordinary ways, and it makes me think of the birth of my daughter two years ago. We started in a pool but eventually finished with my legs in stirrups and bright lights over me, despite my hopes and my vision of what I had heard birth could be: natural, beautiful, with little assistance. I am thankful though, because when things got difficult my baby and I had help. Since that experience I have wondered what I was hoping for in a ‘natural’ birth. As I look around me now on this bright spring morning, with life going about its mysterious ways, and having read Helen Jukes’s new book Mother Animal, I see that there are endless ways to be ‘natural’.
Jukes’s first book, A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings, was a personal reflection on bee-keeping. Her latest book is a blend of memoir, Nature writing and popular science – and it is as astonishing as the wild world outside. I felt grateful when I read “difficult labours aren’t a uniquely human problem … birth in the animal kingdom can be far from easy”. (I am also grateful that I am not a porcupine mother, whose babies emerge fully quilled…)
Jukes traces her journey to motherhood, noticing how parents are sold all kinds of ‘naturalness’ – whether online via particular words and aesthetics – bamboo, ‘eco’, earthy colours – or via “the right encounters with bodily fluids and flesh”. Jukes signed up for a hypnobirthing course recommended by a friend because she “liked the thought of being able to outmanoeuvre pain”. But “the need for assistance is almost universal across cultures”. Here, and in each stage of her journey to motherhood, Jukes looks to the non-human world for insight and at times for reassurance. She wants to know about the way things are, beyond the narrow range of what she’s been told implicitly or explicitly. She learns that births in the animal world are “not straightforward or smooth, they contain particularities”.
She learns too that from Darwin’s time, and for much of the 20th century, scientific knowledge was influenced by a set of gendered assumptions about what was ‘natural’. This impacted the process of birth but also the way female animals were seen. Dismissed largely as a homogeneous group, “they went underresearched, their experience overlooked”. But the research is evolving, and it increasingly “challenges us to think again about mothering, and about other animals – not just what separates us, but how we’re joined”. Like, for instance, the way that bonobo monkeys prefer to give birth with other females attending and helping, making it possible that forms of midwifery have been present as we’ve evolved.
Through the lens of deep time, “motherhood soon sheds its associations with stasis. Instead, it appears unsettled, in process – full of proliferating branches and constant balancing acts”. Jukes again and again finds counters to narratives that suggest that “Nature always endures, that a mother’s purest instinct is to protect and care for her young”. Such as the panda who terminated her own pregnancy. I think of my farmer friend who found a tiny, abandoned lamb recently, its mother ignoring it in favour of its larger and healthier siblings. Jukes’s book, then, is an unpicking of the misconceptions about motherhood and about ‘naturalness’. Nature is diverse, changeable, adapted to place and time and species.
Jukes wants to know too about the world that her child is entering. She reads about the future shaped by the climate crisis and explores the “forever chemicals” that have seeped into our bodies and our babies. Pregnancy handbooks do not cover this. They are not about the community or the world that we are part of. Forever chemicals are “significantly related to early undesired weaning, or not initiating breastfeeding at all”, and “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”.
And so, as each stage of pregnancy and early motherhood unfurls, so does Jukes’s disbelief and anger. She speaks to a veterinary epidemiologist who led an autopsy on an orca from a population where there had been no offspring in 25 years. The orca’s ovaries were scarred, and toxic chemicals from industrial paints and glues were found in her body at levels 100 times over what is safe. The epidemiologist shared with Jukes that he had decided not to have children. His work brings him up close to a planet in crisis, and I recognise the pull of the choice he’s made. And yet I did have a daughter, and I think too that this is where the hope is. Deeper than anxiety, deeper than our age and its forever chemicals, is our belief that life in its complexity and wildness matters.
The accounts of the non-human world woven with Jukes’s own story give her exploration an expansive, Attenborough-like quality. We learn of the Australian three-toed skink, who can have eggs and live young in the same litter; the llamas, who hum when they give birth; the Laysan albatross, who often raise chicks in female pairs. Mothering across species is complex, diverse, adaptable. But how adaptable mothering will be to the onslaught of pollution present in the world and in all our bodies is an unknown. We are vulnerable. We have evolved alongside each other but, vitally, in response to particular places and niches that are rapidly changing.
Jukes offers graceful rage but also vision. We learn that her relationship with the father of her daughter has broken down. She turns again to the non-human world and here too she finds other ways of mothering and caring. “We were never meant to do it all alone,” I think to myself as I read about mother lions who raise offspring together, and emperor penguins who share communal crèche duty.
In Mother Animal, Jukes encounters animals as guides, but also as neighbours and roommates in a resilient, adaptable, changing world. The book is about transformed bodies: Jukes’s own, and the planet we all share. It is a cry for collective care, not just within our species, but extended to reach around the world. Jukes asks questions about what it is to be a mother – and really, a human – today, in the world as it is. It is a vulnerable, urgent, astonishing book.
Mother Animal by Helen Jukes. Elliott & Thompson, 2025. ISBN: 1783968389
