10-Year-Old Girl Gives Birth in Colombia: She's Not the Youngest [VIDEO]
Most 10-year-old girls first grapple with the notion of motherhood when they play with a toy doll, but for an indigenous Colombian girl that notion became a reality when she underwent a Caesarean Section and was delivered a daughter weighing just 5 pounds on Friday.
The unnamed girl, a member of an indigenous tribe called the Wayuu, arrived in hospital bleeding and crying from the enormous pain caused by her contractions, according to Univision's Primer Impacto. The pre-teen was 39 weeks pregnant when she arrived in hospital and it was the first time she had received medical assistance regarding her pregnancy.
Doctors in the hospital decided to carry out a C-section as a result of the young girls' age. The baby's head needs to come through a bony outlet. But in a young girl, the pelvis may not be ready or big enough to deliver a baby, Dr. Kimberly Gecsi, an Ob/Gyn at UH Case Medical Center in Cleveland, told ABC News.
This was not the first time doctors in the hospital had seen pregnant young girls from the Wayuu ethnicity. When in fact [the girls] should be playing with dolls, they have to care for a baby. This is shocking, Efraín Pacheco Casadiego, director of the hospital told Efrain Pacheco Casadiego told RCN La Radio Noticias.
Members of the Wuyuu tribe have kept quiet about the pregnancy and the baby's father is yet to be revealed, although rumors suggest it was a 15-year-old boy from the tribe.
In any case, it's not as easy to prosecute tribe members for underage sex, as the Colombian constitution guarantees the Wayuu community a certain level of autonomy.
Since it's a Wayuu girl we are trying to respect all of their rights, since they have autonomy and their own jurisdiction, Alejandro Samplayo, director of parenthood organization Instituto Colombiano Bienestar Familiar told the Daily Mail.
The age for menstruation keeps dropping and is even lower for Hispanic girls, according to doctor Gecsi. While it is getting easier for these girls to get pregnant, delivering a baby can pose severe health risks on the undeveloped body of a pre-teen.
The Wayuu Tribe is one of the largest indigenous populations from Columbia and Venezuela, located in the desert peninsula of Guajira. Giving birth at a young age is said to be typical of Wayuu customs.
The Wayuu girl and her baby have been reported as being in stable condition, but the pre-teen has refused to breast feed her baby.
Youngest Girl to Give Birth
Lina Medina from Peru was the youngest person in the world to give birth in 1933, when she was just five-years-old.
The girl was brought to hospital by her parents because of her increasing abdominal size when the doctors confirmed that she was seven months pregnant.
The five-year-old gave birth to a baby boy by a Caesarean Section just one month after she found out she was pregnant.
The paternity of the baby was never revealed, but the girl's father was arrested for suspicion of rape and incest and later released due to a lack of evidence.
Her son, Gerardo lived until the age of 40, when he died from bone marrow disease.
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