Girl gives birth at age five. Then the doctor discovers something shocking. A woman becomes able to get pregnant when she ovulates for the first time about 14 days before her first menstrual period. This happens to some women as early as they’re eight years old or even earlier. Most often, ovulation begins before women turn 20.
On average, it happens when a girl is between twelve and 13. It’s important for young women to know that their first ovulation will happen before their first period. This means that a young woman can get pregnant from vaginal intercourse before her first period. Ovulation stops happening in women’s lives when they’re older. The last ovulation in a woman’s life is called menopause.
Menopause can happen as early as when a woman is 40, but the average age for menopause is 51. Lena Martella Medina is confirmed to be the youngest mother in history, giving birth at the young age of five years and seven months old. Lena Medina was born on September 23, 1933, in Peru. She came from what seemed to be a humble family, but her mother by the same name of Victoria Lucia, who was a housemaker, and her father by the name of Tiberella Medina, who was a silversmith. In 1939, Lena Medina of Peru became the youngest person to give birth when she had a baby named Gerardo at just the age of five.
In the early spring of 1939, parents in a remote Peruvian village noticed that their five year old daughter had an enlarged belly. Fearful that the swelling was a tumor, Tiberella Medina and Victoria Lucia took their little girl from the family’s home in Tokuropo to see a doctor in Lima. To the parents shock, the doctors discovered that their daughter, Lena Medina, was seven months pregnant, and on May 14, 1939, Medina gave birth via a C section to a healthy baby boy. At five years, seven months, and 21 days of age, she became the youngest mother in the world. Medina’s case took pediatricians by surprise and attracted international attention that she and her family never wanted.
To this day, Medina has never told authorities who the father was, and she and her family still shun publicity and avoid any opportunity for a tell all interview. Despite the mystery that continues to surround the case of the world’s youngest mother, more insight has come to light on how Lena Medina got pregnant and who the father may have been born on September 23, 1933, in one of the poorest villages in Peru. Lena Medina was one of nine children. Her pregnancy at such an early age obviously came as a disturbing shock to her loved ones and the public. But to a pediatric endocrinologist, the idea that a five year old child could get pregnant wasn’t entirely unthinkable.
It’s believed that Medina had a rare genetic condition called precocious puberty, which causes a child’s body to change into that of an adult too soon before the age of eight. For girls and before age nine for boys. Boys with this condition will often experience a deepening voice, enlarged genitals, and facial hair. Girls with this condition will typically have their first period and develop breasts early on. It affects about one in every 100 children.
Roughly ten times more girls than boys develop this way. Often Timess 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 faster than their peers, so there are suspicions that precocious puberty might be accelerated by sexual contact at an early age. In the case of Lena Medina, Dr. Edmundo Escommel reported to a medical Journal that she had her first period when she was only eight months old.
However, other publications claimed that she was three years old when she began menstruating. Either way, it’s a shockingly early start. Further examinations of five year old Medina showed that she had already developed breasts wider than normal hips and advanced, that is, postpubescent bone growth. But of course, even though her body was developing early, she was still very clearly a young child who was the father of Lena Medina’s baby. Precocious puberty partially explains how Lina Medina got pregnant, but of course it doesn’t explain everything.
After all, someone else had to get her pregnant, and sadly, given the 100,000 to one odds against it, that person probably wasn’t a little boy with the same condition that she had. Medina never told her doctors or the authorities who the father was or the circumstances of the assault that led to her pregnancy, but due to her young age, she might not have even known herself. Dr. Esquemel said that she couldn’t give precise responses when questioned about the father. Tibarello Medina’s father, who worked as a local silversmith, was briefly arrested for the suspected rape of his child.
However, he was released and the charges against him were dropped when no evidence or witness statements could be found to hold him responsible. For his part, Tiberella Strenuously denied ever raping his daughter in the years following the birth. Some news agencies speculated that Medina may have been attacked during unspecified festivities that took place near her village. However, this was never proven. Once Lina Medina’s pregnancy became generally known, it garnered attention from all over the world.
Newspapers in Peru unsuccessfully offered the Medina family thousands of dollars for the rights to interview and to film Lena. Meanwhile, newspapers in the United States had a field day reporting on the story, and they also attempted to interview the youngest mother in the world. Offers were even made to pay the family to come to the United States, but Medina and her family declined to speak publicly. It was perhaps inevitable, given the astounding nature of Medina’s condition and her aversion to scrutiny, that some observers would accuse her family of hoaxing the whole story. In the over 80 years that have passed, this seems unlikely to be the cause.
Neither Medina nor her family have tried to capitalize on the story, and medical records from the time provide ample documentation of her condition during her pregnancy. Only two photographs were known to be taken of Medina while she was pregnant, and only one of those, a low resolution profile picture, was ever published outside of medical literature. Her case file also contains numerous accounts by doctors who treated her, as well as clearly defined xrays of her abdomen that show the bones of a developing fetus inside her body. Blood work also confirmed her pregnancy, and all papers published in the literature passed peer review without a hitch. That said, every request for an interview has been refused by Medina, and she would go on to avoid publicity for the rest of her life.
Refusing to sit for interviews with international wire services and local newspapers alike, Medina’s aversion to the spotlight apparently continues to this day. What Happened to Lina Medina? Lina Medina seems to have gotten good medical care, especially for the time and place in which she lived, and she gave birth to a healthy baby boy. Delivery was by cesarean section because despite Medina’s prematurely widened hip, she probably would have had a difficult time passing a full sized child through the birth canal. Lena Medina’s child was named Gerardo after the doctor who first examined Medina and the infant went home to the family’s village in Tokrapo after he was released from the hospital.
Two years after the birth, a specialist in child education at Columbia University named Paul Kosk got permission to visit the Medina family. Kosk found that the youngest person to give birth was above normal intelligence and that her baby was perfectly normal. She thinks of the child as a baby brother, and so does the rest of the family. Coast reported. An obstetrician named Jose Sandoval, who wrote a book about the Medina case, said that Medina often preferred to play with her dolls rather than her child.
As for Gerardo Medina himself, he grew up thinking that Medina was his older sister. He found out the truth when he was about ten. While Gerardo Medina was healthy for most of his life, he sadly ended up dying relatively young at the age of 40. In 1079, cause of death was bone disease. As for Lena Medina, it’s unclear if she’s still alive today or not.
After a shocking pregnancy, she went on to live a quiet life in Peru. In her young adulthood, she found work as a Secretary for the doctor who attended the birth, which paid her way through school at roughly the same time. Lena managed to put Gerardo through school as well. She later married a man named Raul Gerardo in the early 19s 70s and gave birth to her second son when she was in her 30s. As of 2002, Medina and Gerato were still married and living in a poor neighborhood in Lima.
From a biological point of view, it’s highly unlikely but not unheard. Of pregnancy is possible from the first time they have their periods, which is usually when they go through puberty. But there are exceptions. Usually those exceptions are not a problem and won’t even get noticed as people that young don’t have sex, but if they do, they can get pregnant. Of course, it’s very sick.
People shouldn’t want to have sex with children. Unfortunately, pedophiles exist and children are being abused for sex. I say abused because at that age, they’re not capable of giving consent. It’s the most disgusting type of rape I’m aware of, but it happens. The chances of such rape leading to pregnancy Are extremely low, but not unheard of.
