A young girl in Colombia, believed to be just 10 years old, arrived at a hospital and gave birth without any advance care, shocking many in that country and around the world.
While details of the story are sketchy, the girl reportedly came into a local hospital profusely bleeding and in enormous pain, Univision’s Primer Impacto reported.
According to the report, she gave birth to a 51/2-pound baby. The delivery was the first time she had seen a doctor during her pregnancy.
While the quickly spreading story has horrified people around the world, little is known about the young girl’s identity, the baby’s father or how such a young girl got into such a grownup situation.
Members of the community reportedly have kept mum about the girl’s child.
The mother, according to reports, does not understand much about motherhood and doesn’t want to breast-feed her baby.
According to the report, she’s part of the Wayuu tribe, which can be immune from Colombian laws.
Sadly, it’s a growing problem for the tribe, one expert said.
“We’ve already seen similar cases of Wayuu girls,” Efraín Pacheco Casadiego, director of the hospital where the girl gave birth, told RCN La Radio noticias, the Huffington Post reported. “At a time when [the girls\] should be playing with dolls, they go to having to take care of a baby. It’s shocking.”
The young mother is not the first preteen to give birth.
Late last year, a 10-year-old Mexican girl gave birth to a baby boy. And in August 2010, an 11-year-old Mexican girl had a child after being denied an abortion by the local Justice Department.
In Colombia, abortions are mostly illegal unless there is a threat to the life or health of the woman, if the fetus is badly deformed or if the pregnancy is the result of rape, according to a 2006 law.
That law was passed after an 11-year-old girl had to go to court to get an abortion authorized.
She had been impregnated by her stepfather.
