Lina Medina

Lina Marcela Medina de Jurado (Huancavelica Region, Peru, September 27, 1933) is the youngest confirmed mother in history: she became a mother at the age of 5 years, 7 months and 21 days old.

Pregnancy

Her parents, Tiburcio Medina and Victoria Loza, noticed that Lina (one of their eight children) had a bulging belly and due to the superstitions of her neighbors (who said she had a snake inside and blamed Apu, the spirit for the evil). de los Andes) in mid-April 1939, he took her to the village shamans, who believed that she had a tumor and advised him to take her to Pisco, the nearest city.

Dr. Gerardo Lozada treated her and took her to Lima, the capital of Peru, where specialists who treated Lina were Dr. Gerardo Lozada and Dr. Rolando Colareta Landa was in charge of anesthesia. They both helped her. It was a very strange case due to her precocious condition. She had conceived her son at the age of 4 years and 8 months. At 2 years and 8 months of age she had started menstruating. One month later, on May 14, 1939, Lina, 5 years, 7 months, and 21 days old, gave birth to a child by caesarean section performed by surgeons Dr. Lozada, Dr. Rolando Colareta, and Dr. Bussalleu.

Gerardo Medina

His son, Gerardo Medina (who inherited the name of Doctor Lozada), weighed 2,700 grams. The grandparents turned down an offer to travel to exhibit at the New York World's Fair (expenses paid and $4,000 per month). But they accepted another offer of $5,000 from an American businessman for mother and son to travel to be investigated by scientists in the United States (the proposal included a fund that guaranteed their well-being for life). But the Peruvian government decreed that Lina and her son were in "moral danger" and decided to create a special commission to protect her. In a few months they abandoned the case and Lina never received any money from that businessman.

Her son was raised believing he was his grandparents' tenth child, but at the age of ten he learned that Lina was not his sister but his mother. He died at the age of 40 from a rare disease of the bone marrow, a disease that recurs in cases of incest.

Father's identity

It is not known who the father of the child was. Lina's father, Tiburcio, was in jail for several days on suspicion of rape. When he was released, suspicion fell on one of Lina's brothers. In Peru it came to be believed that Lina was a kind of Virgin Mary, that she had conceived as a virgin.

Adult Life

At the age of 33, Lina Medina married Raúl Jurado, with whom at the age of 38 (in 1972) she had another son, who immigrated to Tijuana, Mexico. She and Raúl Jurado built a house that was demolished in the eighties to build a highway. Raúl died in 2008. Lina later resides in a run-down suburb of Lima known for its dangerousness as "Chicago Chico".

The gynecologist José Sandoval Paredes wrote about her in Mother at five years old, which in 2002 accelerated the procedures so that Lina finally received a lifetime pension from Peru for 35 euros per month from October 2012.