It just saddens me to find out about things like this: in Colombia, a ten year old girl has given birth to another baby girl, making her one of the youngest mothers to ever live.

A girl from the Wayuu tribe. Source

According to Univision’s Primer Impacto, the girl, which was not named for obvious reasons, arrived in hospital in a great deal of pain, crying and suffering as a result of the contractions. She delivered by a C-section, which is not that uncommon for very young mothers. The good news is that the baby girl is perfectly healthy, and from what doctors can see, she has every reason to grow up just fine – and this is pretty rare in these cases.

“These girls are not ready to be pregnant. Their bodies are not mature…They may be able to get pregnant, but being able to have a baby is a whole other situation.”, said Dr. Frederick Gonzalez, a clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at NYU Langone Medical Center.

The police don’t know anything about the father and they can’t do anything to find out either. The thing is, the girl is from Manaure, a town in the Colombian Department of La Guajira, and she is a member of the Wayuu people, a tribe in northern Colombia, which means that they have their own jurisdiction, and the police or other authorities can’t do anything to intervene.

“We’ve already seen several cases [of pregnancy] in girls of the Wayuu ethnicity…When in fact [the girls] should be playing with dolls, they are having to care for a baby. This is shocking.”, declared Efraín Pacheco Casadiego, director of the hospital where the girl gave birth.

So what do you feel about this? It seems natural to leave the tribe to govern for itself and not step in, but then again, a ten year old giving birth is not really natural. The youngest mother ever was Lina Medina, from Peru, who gave birth at 5 years and 7 months.