5 year Old Mother, Youngest of all Time.
The Bizarre
In 1939, a healthy young girl named Lina Medina gave birth
to an equally healthy baby boy. The only noteworthy detail about this event was
the mother’s age: she was five-years-old.
In the early spring of 1939, parents in a remote village in
Peru noticed that their five-year-old daughter’s belly became enlarged.
Fearful that the continual swelling was a sign of an
abdominal tumour, Tiburelo Medina and Victoria Losea took their little girl
from the family’s home in Ticrapo to a doctor far away in Lima.
To their shock and horror, the doctor discovered that their
daughter, Lina Medina, was seven months pregnant. Just six weeks later on 14
May 1939, Medina gave birth via c-section to a healthy, six-pound baby boy. At
five years, seven months, and 21 days of age, she became the youngest girl
known to have given birth.
Precocious Puberty
Born on 23
September 1933, in one of the poorest villages in Peru, Lina Medina as one of
nine children. And even though her pregnancy came as a disturbing shock to her
loved ones (and the public), the idea that a 5-year-old child could get
pregnant wasn’t entirely unthinkable to pediatric endocrinologists.
Precocious
puberty is a rare genetic condition in which a child’s body reaches sexual
maturity and beings changing into that of an adult before the age of eight.
Boys with
this condition will often experience a deepening voice, enlarged genitals, and
even facial hair. Girls with this condition will typically have their first
period and develop breasts much earlier than normal.
It affects
about one in every 10,000 children. Roughly 10 times more girls than boys
develop this way.
In most
cases, the cause of precocious puberty can’t be identified. However recent
studies have found that young girls who were sexually abused may go through
puberty fast than their peers.
For that
reason, there are suspicious that precocious puberty might be accelerated by
sexual contact at an early age.
Alleged Father
Precocious
puberty is a good explanation for Lina Medina’s pregnancy, but obviously, it
doesn’t explain everything.
She was,
after all, a child herself. So somebody had to get her pregnant. And given the
100,000-to-1 odds against it, that person probably wasn’t a precociously
pubescent five-year-old boy.
Medina never
told her doctors or the authorities who the father was or the circumstances of
the assault that had to occur for her to become pregnant. Due to her young age,
she might not have even known herself.
Dr Escomel
even said that she “couldn’t give precise responses” when questioned about the
father.
Tiburelo,
Medina’s father who worked as `a local silversmith, was briefly arrested for
suspected child rape. However, he was eventually released and the charges
against him dropped when no evidence or witness statements could be found to
hold him. Tiburelo strenuously denied ever having had sex with his own
daughter.
It must have been tormenting for her at such a tender age. Her childhood was robbed from her. This world can be very cruel.
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