How Real Women Look After Pregnancy ProjectPost Pregnancy Body 4thtrimesterbodies Nicole

The 4th Trimester Bodies Project is a project created by photographer and mother Ashlee Wells Jackson that is dedicated to celebrating motherhood and highlighting the inherent beauty of real post baby bodies, with all the changes pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding bring. While the project is titled 4th Trimester Bodies, the project is addressed to mothers of all ages and with a variety of shapes and sizes regardless of how many children they have, who are willing to participate in a photoshoot that tastefully highlights an honest picture of the changes motherhood brings.

Challenging the prevalent expectations of how a woman should look like after giving birth, the project aims to change the current thinking paradigm that encourages women to look at their bodies with a critical eye and place the focus on respecting and celebrating real bodies for their amazing ability to create and sustain life and embracing “imperfections” rather than focusing on eliminating them.

The project that has started a while back was initially planning to photograph 100 women and tell their stories in a book, but has greatly expanded in a short amount of time and now aims to capture images of 1500 women worldwide by the end of 2015. The book is expected to have three volumes and the first volume is scheduled for release in late 2014 or early 2015.