Doctors Appalled By 10-Year-Old Giving Birth

[n2doc]

Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Senior Writer
Date: 09 April 2012

A 10-year-old girl in Colombia recently gave birth via caesarian section, placing her among the youngest mothers in the world. Though the girl is now recovering, her case highlights the dangers of pregnancy before maturity, doctors say.

"No 10-year-old anywhere in the world should be having a baby," Lewis Wall, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, told LiveScience.

According to Good Morning America, the 10-year-old girl, a member of the Wayuu tribe in Manaure, Colombia, delivered a 5-pound (2.26 kilogram) baby girl. The age of the father is not known, but Colombian police reportedly cannot press charges as the tribe is under its own jurisdiction.

The obvious risks of such an ordeal are mental, Wall said.

more
http://www.livescience.com/19584-10-year-birth.html

[virgogal]

1. Words fail me and they rarely do.

[one_voice]

2. I wanna know how she got...

pregnant.

I know how, but seriously how?

This is so very sad. Ten years old, she should have been playing mommy with her baby dolls, not becoming a mommy.

[TheWraith]

3. Apparently this isn't the first such case from this tribe.

Just the youngest so far.

[Yo_Mama]

9. I heard from a man at the grocery store some years ago

That a nine year old gave birth in a hospital one county over (in GA).

He heard it from his sister-in-law who was a nurse at the hospital. He told me he was against abortion, but not in a case like that.

I think this happens more than we know. It can't be safe. Children as young as 6 have sometimes given birth:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_youngest_birth_mothers

Apparently sometimes things slip a cog and girls can become fertile very young. Imagine being a grandmother at 15 when your daughter gives birth to a child, but that supposedly really did happen. Sometimes it runs in families.

[nanabugg]

36. The elephant in the room is who and what it takes to get any female pregnant.

It doesn't happen in a vacuum folks. Yet few seem to even want mention the males involved in these situations.

[cindyperry2010]

4. that is vile

[Mz Pip]

5. It's certainly not unheard of.

I remember 30 years ago when I worked for the county there was an 11 year old who was pregnant. It was really pretty depressing. She asked her mom for a doll for Christmas.

[nadinbrzezinski]

6. Wait, she is a a member of an indigenous tribe?

I know the physical risks. Hell, the fact the child went through menarche is amazing but....

I hate to say it, but believe it or not this child had nothing of the sort we might understand as such.

Anybody taken an anthro class? Serious, it might explain this.

Not justifying it, but using our values on people who have a radically different culture smacks of imperialism. In fact, Western Imperialism.

Doctor Wall quite honestly practice medicine, anthropology is not your job.

[Rex]

14. True it does, so why not look at the tribe in question without a cultural bias?

Are they at risk of going extinct? How would you logically rationalize any culture having children that are having children? We can speculate all we want to, great thing about forums. What is the average age of the tribe, population size, you know the drill.

[nadinbrzezinski]

15. I knw the drill

From my years in college... The Yamomano had kids early. Their expectancy was average for hunter gatherers. If you live forty years, you tend to have children early. Ten is a little early, but twelve and fourteen is not unheard off. There is more, many of these kids died before the first year.

Will give you an example from the Jewish faith. The Bar Mitzvah is an initiation rite into adulthood. These days it lacks it's real power, but 2000 years ago you can bet a 13 year old coud and did at times marry.

Why the doctor should stick to the obstetric complications. Lack of modern medicine, it includes death. Why they did a c-section, this young woman is not ready physically to deliver.

As to menarche, I want to know medically how she managed that feat...literally what is in the water?

[Liquorice]

17. I never bought into the cultural relativism thing, no matter

how much they pushed it. I minored in Anthropology. When I hear of a 10 year old giving birth, and via c-section no less, I am of the opinion that it is horrendous. It is their culture, but that doesn't mean I have to believe that it's okay for them to impregnate 10 year olds. If in the Wayuu culture, 10 year olds regularly have sex and give birth, I believe their culture is rotten, and they're on a bad trajectory. They are treating little girls like baby makers, and not allowing them to have a childhood. I have also read that this tribe may be doing female genital mutilation.

I believe we can have an opinion and judge any culture, and certainly one that does things like accepting and encouraging sex with 10 year olds is abusive to little girls. A 10 year old girl is a little girl, no matter what culture they are in.

[nadinbrzezinski]

19. Here news to you

Childhood is a middle class western invention.

For most f history it hasn't really existed. Kids as early as ten, from all classes, went into somebody else's household as early as ten, as Aprentices or indentures in Elizabethan Engand, for example.

It's nice we have the luxury of it, even extending to out twenties. It is real nice. But throughout history children started working as early as three.

So childhood is less than a second in that historic clock..

Since I was a young immigrant at the time I wrote my paper on my fellow classmates. These days I coud not, lesson, valuable, all cultures have something of value, all of them.

And while you may think they are kid factories and be horrified by it, it is truly a survival strategy in hunter gatherer societies.

Oh and those are not children. It's hard to remember that. I am sure they woukd look at some of what we do and eat with the exact same level of disdain.

[Auggie]

32. +1

[Johnny Rico]

20. My favorite story about cultural relativism:

After Sir Charles Napier (the British army's commander-in-chief in India in the mid-19th Century) outlawed the practice of suttee, many of the Indian locals complained, saying that suttee was one of their time- honored customs. Napier responded, "You say it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. However, where I come from, we also have a custom: When men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre. My carpenters will build a gallows beside it. If you wish, you may practice your custom. Rest assured we will practice ours."

[redqueen]

24. Thank you. nt

[kiva]

34. Excellent.

Cultural relativism is a useful tool for anthropologists, not so much for anyone else.

[Rex]

21. Very good question, I didn't think a 10

year old could get pregnant. Shows what I know.

[One_Life_To_Give]

23. 2-3 Standard deviations early?

That would leave between1 in 100 to 1 in 1000 10yr old girls should of reached menarche by their 10th year.
Or globally between 35,000 and 350,000 girls.

Doesn't have to be anything in the water. Statistically improbable event happen. The record youngest mother recorded was 5 years, due in part to precocious puberty at age 2.

[Rex]

31. Reading about that now...totally floored.

5 years 7 months and 17 days.

[Mariana]

27. 2000 years ago? How about 55 years ago, in the US?

Jerry Lee Lewis Marries 13-Year-Old Cousin (1957)

http://www.sofein.com/RockStories/Jerry.html

Sure, his career was ruined because it really put a lot of people off. Still, the law was on the books allowing it, and some official performed the ceremony, so we know that it was generally accepted in that part of the country to marry that young.

IIRC, girls could still legally marry at 12 in Mississippi as late as about 1980 - and maybe significantly later than that. I moved away from that area about then so I don't know when the law was changed.

[HooptieWagon]

7. The tribe might think some of our customs disgusting.

[cindyperry2010]

10. that is true and sorry if i sounded ethnocentric

just a hard one to hear

[Rowdyboy]

8. The world is a horribly sad and disheartening place..Horrendous tragedies occur daily, if not hourly

10 year olds should not be having babies. But then black kids should be able to walk home from the store wearing hoodies, and every country should have free elections, and gay people should be able to marry and women should have equal pay for equal work. Life can be really discouraging.

Doesn't make it any better but sometimes all you can do is wish the best and do what little you can to help people in these nightmarish situations. What else is there?

[undeterred]

11. I met a doctor who performed his first abortion on a ten year old.

She was, of course, a victim of incest. He was a family practicioner out in the country and he said this sort of thing happens all the time. The girl might have died giving birth if she had not had an abortion. The doctor was a Quaker who had never intended to perform abortions, but faced with this situation he felt it was the right thing to do.

[David__77]

12. My ex had an 11-year old get pregnant in his 6th grade class...

I don't think this sort of thing is nearly so uncommon as many would think. Ability to get pregnant commonly starts around then.

[Mariana]

28. It's not. There's a reason the marriage age

in some states was as low as 12 until fairly recently. When I was in 7th and 8th grade (in Alabama) several girls left school to "stay with their aunts" for half a year or so. I don't remember any under 13, but it may have happened and I didn't know about it because they weren't in my grade.

[Downwinder]

13. GOP poster child.

[nadinbrzezinski]

16. What is the GOP?

No serious, not everything involves the us let alone the GOP.

[steve2470]

18. World's youngest mother was FIVE.....

The world's youngest mother is Lina Medina, a Peruvian girl who gave birth just two weeks after her fifth birthday. The birth was major news when it happened in 1933 as it was unheard of that a girl would be able to give birth at such a young age.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2125512/10-year-old-Colombian-girl-gives-birth-healthy-baby-daughter.html

[YellowRubberDuckie]

22. When a girl gets her period, her body is ready to carry a child.

Actually, the younger a person is when they get pregnant, the easier the birth. For MILLENIA, children as young as 12, 13 have gotten married and had children. This is more of a social issue than it is a biological one.

[Nikia]

29. Do you have a link for that?

Every article I have seen suggests that girls who give birth in their early teen years are more at risk of dying or having complications during birth for their first pregnancy than women who are in their late teens or twenties. It is normal for the pelvic bones to expand throughout the teen years, making natural vaginal birth easier.
Even when a healthy American twelve year is pregnant, it usually is treated as a high risk pregnancy. It isn't just a social thing.

[YellowRubberDuckie]

39. No. I was speaking historically.

And it is a social more that keeps kids from giving birth. IN DIFFERENT TIMES, it was accepted and it was the norm. That is all I was saying.

[Mariana]

30. I dunno, my daughter's pelvis was awfully narrow

and small when her periods started when she was 12. She still had the shape and skeletal structure of a little girl.

[gkhouston]

37. "Able" isn't the same thing as "ready".

Women tend to have more complications at both extremes of the fertility spectrum.

[redqueen]

38. Exactly.

It'd be nice if that "grass on the field" kind of crap wasn't so widespread.

[Initech]

25. i don't have a medical degree and I'm completely appalled at the thought of this.

[redqueen]

26. Workers rights are a western invention,

so, using the logic of some in this thread we should allow workers in other countries to practice their traditions of child labor and long workdays and low pay. Wouldn't want to infringe on their customs.

Logic that says little girls in other cultures don't deserve to escape this kind of situation because of 'culture' makes me physically sick.

[TBF]

35. +1 nt

[Typical NYC Lib]

33. Wayuu gotta be like that?

"Because we don't have to live the way you do, Yankee. Now fuck off!"