France likely to pass bill banning super-skinny models

France's government is likely to back a bill banning excessively thin fashion models as well as potentially fining the modelling agency or fashion house that hires them and sending the agents to jail, the health minister said on Monday.

Style-conscious France, with its fashion and
luxury industries worth tens of billions of euros (dollars), would join Italy, Spain and Israel which all adopted laws against too-thin models on catwalks or in advertising campaigns in early 2013.
The law would enforce regular weight checks and fines of up to 75,000 euros ($79,000) for any breaches, with up to six months in jail for staff involved, Socialist lawmaker Olivier Veran, who wrote the amendments, told Le Parisien.
Models would have to present a medical certificate showing a Body Mass Index (BMI) of at least 18, about 55 kg (121 lb) for a height of 1.75 metres (5.7 feet), before being hired for a job and for a few weeks afterwards, he said.
The bill's amendments also propose penalties for anything made public that could be seen as
encouraging extreme thinness, notably pro-anorexia websites that glorify unhealthy lifestyles.
In 2007, Isabelle Caro, an anorexic 28-year-old
former French fashion model, died after posing for a photographic campaign to raise awareness about the illness. Some 30-40,000 people in France suffer from anorexia, most of them teenagers, said Veran, who is a doctor.culled


30-40,000 is quite large! And I think this is a good initiative by the France government. I always wonder why modeling agencies would even hire an anorexic person in the first place. What do you think?