iheartmoms

Remember flipping through magazines with your girlfriends when you were 14? Remember how all of those “perfectly” thin models without a single blemish, line, or trace of cellulite made you feel?

Well, Julia Bluhm, a 14-year-old teenager from Maine is tired of seeing all those airbrushed and Photoshopped models and she’s tired of hearing all her friends complain about how they feel fat and ugly.

“I look at the pictures and they just don’t look like girls I see walking down the street and stuff,” she said.

One day, after thumbing through Seventeen, Julia had an idea.

An avid Spark blogger, a project that fights the sexualization of girls, Julia decided to talk about the subject with the other bloggers. Then she started an online petition drive through Change.org asking Seventeen to “commit to printing one unaltered — real — photo spread per month.”

Julia has collected more than 48,000 signatures.

In the petition, Bluhm wrote that girls are deeply influenced by the perfect images they see in the magazines. She said that they end up tearing their own bodies and faces apart when they fail to live up to the unrealistic standards that these Photoshopped and airbrushed images set.

“Here’s what a lot of girls don’t know,” she wrote in the petition, “those ‘pretty women’ that we see in magazines are fake. They’re often Photoshopped, airbrushed and edited to look thinner, and to appear like they have perfect skin. A girl you see in a magazine probably looks a lot different in real life.”

“For the sake of all the struggling girls all over America, who read Seventeen and think these fake images are what they should be, I’m stepping up.”

Julia’s request for the magazine to print just one unaltered image a month sounds reasonable, right? Well, apparently, it’s not.

Seventeen’s editors met with Julia recently and released the following statement:

“We’re proud of Julia for being so passionate about an issue – it’s exactly the kind of attitude we encourage in our readers – so we invited her to our office to meet with editor in chief Ann Shoket this morning. They had a great discussion and we believe that Julia left understanding that Seventeen celebrates girls for being their authentic selves, and that’s how we present them. We feature real girls in our pages and there is no other magazine that highlights such a diversity of size, shape, skin tone and ethnicity.”

In other words: We sat Julia down and gave her a little talking to about the fashion industry. We explained that girls need to stay insecure, self-conscious and obsessed with their appearance so that we can run our business and sell more advertising space.

Is it really too much to ask that one of the leading teen magazines print JUST ONE spread depicting a real, unaltered image of a girl?

You should be ashamed of yourselves Seventeen! Why not step up to the plate, show some real unaltered girls and start setting the bar for other teen magazines?

After all, other magazines have been making headlines these days—but in a more positive light. Conde Nast International recently announced that its 19 international editions of Vogue magazine will no longer carry photographs of models younger than 16 or models who “appear to have an eating disorder.”

When a leading magazine like Vogue takes a stand and announces its new policy banning underage and underfed women—it’s a triumph not just for what it does, but for what it represents.

Now, if only Seventeen magazine could take a queue and start setting a better example for the young girls that idolize its pages…

We applaud Vogue for taking a step in the right direction and we hope that other magazines (like maybe Seventeen?) will soon follow in their footsteps.

What do you think about the altered and Photoshopped images that appear in magazines today?

When her water broke at just 18 weeks, Diana Stone found herself fighting for the right to stay pregnant with her twin boys.

It all started on a Friday. She was at home with her daughter Bella when she felt the urge to pee. She said it was “like a balloon burst.” At first, she was in disbelief. But it just kept coming.

She laid herself on the bathroom floor and propped her legs up while she called her husband and 911. Her husband, Sam Stone, rushed home.

“Once the medics came, I was taken to the nearest hospital (not our current one) while Sam followed with Bella. I was refused admittance into their L&D as I didn’t meet the 20 weeks pregnant standard, and put in an ER room for the next 4 hours hooked to nothing. Eventually they did an ultrasound scan, and the Dr came in.”

With the twins at least 6 weeks away from feasibly surviving on their own and the high risk of infection to Diana (which could endanger her own life) doctors advised her to induce labor and terminate her pregnancy. Still, as she puts it:

“…all I could think of was, ‘What if…’”

After being informed of how high the risks were, Diana and her husband reluctantly agreed to induce. But something still didn’t feel quite right.

After careful consideration, the Stones made a difficult decision. There was a small chance that if Diana’s leak sealed and she was able to keep her babies in her belly for at least 6 more weeks, they could survive.

She writes:

“I thought I was going to die. I’ve never, ever felt anything like that in my life. We were told the babies would be born alive at first but there would be nothing they could possibly do to save them because of gestational age and weight. All I could think of was how I’d hold them in my hands and watch them pass away.

It was too much. I was updating Facebook and stumbled upon a comment that changed our lives, basically asking if we knew we didn’t have to induce and there were other stories like ours out there. I began to click and look and read – I knew what risks we were facing both to myself and the babies, but what if I didn’t at least try? Sam and I decided we couldn’t choose to play God if we had other options still.”

Apparently, the hospital staff was visibly upset by her decision not to induce. Diana shared appalling details about her treatment at the University Medical Center in El Paso, where doctors refused to offer her a bedpan, insert an IV drip, or tilt her bed – all common practice in cases like hers.

She tweeted:

“Omg. Shaking I’m so angry. Was woken up by an MD who told me basically I’m an idiot taking up an expensive hospital bed and need to go home.”

Her story has sparked an outpouring of support. And thankfully, a patient advocate has recently stepped in. Diana is now on strict bed rest as she tries to save her twins.

She has been chronicling her pregnancy on Babble’s “Being Pregnant” as well as on her personal blog, “Hormonal Imbalances.”

Today she wrote:

“I do want to start by saying the apology, explanation, and further treatment at our hospital has been phenomenal. We found out that it was a lack of resident communication that started all of this, and we are grateful for the way the heads of each department have stepped up and made the changes needed to ensure this doesn’t happen again.”

“And now we’re here. 19 weeks and 3 days. We have talked to our MFM about options in a few weeks which I’m holding out for…We have been assured at 23 weeks they will start to throw everything they’ve got at us to get the babies bigger, stronger, and able to survive from there on out…This is day by day. We know anything can change at any moment, but we also know that whatever happens is in God’s hands, not ours.”

What would you do if you were in Diana’s position?

A 6-month-old premature newborn that was pronounced dead in Argentina early this month, was found very much alive in the morgue by her mother 12 hours later, and was revived once more by doctors just last week.

Two hours after being issued a death certificate, the mother, Analia Bouguet, and the father, Fabian Veron, visited the morgue because they wanted to see their child one last time.

“The baby was there and they put the little casket on a stretcher. We looked for a bar to pry it open,” Veron said in a press conference. “My wife looked and uncovered it slowly. She saw the little hand and then uncovered the face. That’s when it let the first little cry out.”

Veron told CNN that when Bouguet touched her baby’s hand and heard a cry she thought to herself: it’s my imagination, it’s my imagination. But it wasn’t. Their baby was alive.

The newborn has been named Luz Milagros, or “Miracle Light.” She is still listed as being in critical condition.

Luz Milagros’ little heart stopped last week after she suffered a hemorrhage in her lungs and stopped breathing. But she was revived by doctors after they performed advanced CPR.

She is still in a critical condition, relying on a machine to help her breathe and taking a concoction of drugs to keep her alive.

But doctors revealed that she had started to drink her mother’s breast milk, which they believe will help stabilize her even further and increases the chances that she will survive.

Luz remains in stable condition in intensive care. Her mother said she is “getting stronger by the minute.” She added:

“I don’t know who is to blame, and I’m not thinking about it at this moment. The joy of knowing she’s alive is covering every other feeling. I’m a Christian, and I believe this was a miracle of God.”