‘A Beautiful Body’ shows women’s post-pregnancy bodies and tells their story

The impetus behind Jade Beall's upcoming photography book A Beautiful Body is to celebrate the bodies of women who have just given birth by photographing over 50 new mothers.

The photos don't hold back: Baring post-pregnancy scars, stretch marks, sagging breasts and bloated tummies, we are challenged to see beauty in places once considered ugly.

"We are facing an epidemic of women who feel unworthy of being called beautiful," the author, photographer, and mother tells Huffington Post. "Mearly all of us struggle to feel beautiful in our own skin."

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Beall believes this struggle is particularly compounded in new mothers.

"Shaming mothers for not 'bouncing back' after childbirth can cause feelings of failure when being a mother is challenging enough, and when a big number of us have already lived a life of feeling un-beautiful prior to giving birth," she says.

A Beautiful Body will also contain personal written accounts of each woman's story.

The idea behind the book, funded via a Kickstarter crowd-sourcing initiative and to be published next January, came about after Beall posted her own semi-nude post-pregnancy portraits on Facebook.

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She received an overwhelmingly positive response with from friends and other mothers begging her to photo them in the same way. She obliged and now has over 5o mothers photographed.

One photo in particular of a friend set off an avalanche of Facebook likes and shares on her company fan page.

Beall does all her photo shoots for free and is relying on volunteers to help put the book together.

As of Tuesday, she has already doubled her crowd-funding goal of $20,000 on Kickstarter, with five days still to go.