One lifestyle photographer is empowering moms to love their postpartum bodies. While Mikaela Shannon is not a mom herself, the 22-year-old started a project called Love Your Postpartum Body after a few of her clients “went nuts” over their postpartum photo shoots.
In the raw and powerful photos, women bare their bodies after baby, showcasing the beauty of pregnancy and childbirth, and the results are jaw-dropping.
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Shannon, who is based out of Ontario, said she loves heading up the project because empowering people is a passion of hers.
“Everything I do is about loving yourself, so it seemed perfect,” she told SELF. Ahead are some of the powerful images from Shannon’s series.
In the photos, the women proudly bare their stretch marks, bellies and scars for all to see. Some hold their children, while others breastfeed or bottle feed. Shannon says that most women are typically nervous when the photo shoot first begins, but that quickly goes away once she gets to know them.
“I really try to make them feel comfortable and try to get to know them,” she says.
A big part of why Shannon started the project was to inspire and empower moms to love themselves and their bodies — a goal that she says has been achieved over the past seven months.
“I’ve had moms say that they shared their photo and someone [who saw the photo] was empowered to wear a bikini because of it,” she said.
While some moms pose for the postpartum photos because it’s a way to embrace their changing bodies, other moms do it for cathartic reasons, especially if they’ve had a miscarriage or stillborn birth.
“Some of the moms posing have just had miscarriages and some of them have had stillbirths, and they feel like it’s kind of final closure,” she says.
Others use it as an opportunity to celebrate and pose with their rainbow baby — aka a baby who has been born after parents have previously lost a child.
Shannon hopes that the photography series will arm moms everywhere with a sense of self confidence — not just the moms who posed for the photos, but moms or moms-to-be who see the images.
“There’s a lot of mom-shaming, and I want people to just be happy,” she says. “They’re doing the best for themselves and their children, and I want them to embrace that and accept what they choose and never feel judged.”
Shannon isn’t the first photographer to showcase the beauty of childbirth. Contests hosted by organizations like the International Association of Professional Birth Photographers and Birth Becomes Her proudly display live shots of pregnancy.
Contests like these aim to not only promote the beauty of childbirth, but also to shed light on other emotions that go into having a child, like pain, wonder and joy.
Shannon’s series comes at a time when more and more women are sharing their own experiences with pregnancy, especially details not typically discussed, like difficult childbirths. One mom even shared a photo of her C-section scar immediately following her child’s birth, writing that a C-section delivery is not the “easy way out” like so many people assume.
“This is what you really look like a few hours post c-section,” she wrote in the caption. “To anyone who thinks it’s the easy way out, well try having a 6 inch gash in your abdomen like a gutted shark who had the body parts of the surfer it ate retrieved! […] After [the medication wears off] it’s like you’ve been hit by a bus which then backed over you just to make sure it didn’t miss you the first time!”
