The Enduring Mystery Of Lina Medina, The World’s Youngest Mother
On May 14, 1939, an expectant mother was rushed into the operating theater of a hospital in the Peruvian capital of Lima. Her baby was on the way, but there was a complication that necessitated a cesarean section. Thankfully for everyone involved, the procedure was a success. A healthy boy, weighing 6 pounds, had arrived into the world. It was a happy end to a stressful day, but there’s an important detail we missed out here. The mother of this new baby was still a baby herself: she was five years old!
A bizarre but true tale
That’s an incredibly disturbing idea, but, bizarrely, it’s absolutely true. This is a story about a girl of just five years of age who fell pregnant and delivered a son. It doesn’t seem like this should even have been possible, but it was. Exactly what happened, though, remains a mystery to this day.
It all started in the spring of 1939, when Tiburelo Medina and Victoria Losea noticed that there was something wrong with their young daughter, Lina. Her belly had become engorged to a terrifying degree, and the prospect that she had a tumor seemed very real.
A medical marvel
Residents of a small, isolated village, Tiburelo and Victoria realized their little girl needed help elsewhere. They journeyed to the city of Lima, where Dr. Gérado Lozada analyzed the girl at the Hospital of Pisco. He initially thought poor Lina had a tumor, too, but his tests soon proved that theory wrong.
Dr. Lozada came to realize that Lina was, in plain terms, a medical marvel. Her medical reports claimed that she’d started having her period by at least the age of three! Her breasts, too, had already developed by this early stage in her life.
Solid records
And here comes the real kicker. Further testing demonstrated the presence of a second heartbeat inside little Lina. It wasn’t her own heart thumping away, but the alternative to that was quite unthinkable. Yet sure enough, an X-ray revealed the strange, almost incomprehensible truth: Lina was carrying a child.
Dr. Erica A. Eugster is a contemporary pediatric endocrinologist, and she’s assessed the medical records that pertain to this bizarre case. According to Dr. Eugster, the documentation seems solid. “There are published reports referring to it, so I don’t doubt it,” she told How Stuff Works.
The youngest mom on the planet
By the time she was assessed by Dr. Lozada, Lina was already heavily pregnant. She’d been carrying the baby for seven months by this time. One shudders at the thought of how uncomfortable that must have been for a person with a frame so small. Yet as unlikely as it seems, both Lina and her baby survived the pregnancy and the birth.
After her C-section had been completed and her boy welcomed into the world, Lina had officially become the youngest mom on the planet. She was five years, seven months, and 21 days old.