For a fee, you can subscribe to an online database of newspapers, http://newspaperarchive.com/DesktopDefault.aspx
It cost me under $100 US/year. I use it mainly to find words, etc. for my participation on a linguist board.
I’m not advocating anyone subscribe to this. It’s just useful to me.
In the first “Believe it or Not” book, published in the late '20’s, there’s an entry about a Chinese couple who were both 5 and had a healthy male child. Apparently the mother was a precocious puberty and at that time and place, eligible for marriage. I guess it was one of those cases where the marriage was probably arranged before the bride and groom were even born. No word on how the father managed his part, however. I’d have thought he’d be too young.
There is also an entry about “Mum-zi”, an African girl who gave birth at eight, as did her daughter, making her a grandmother at seventeen.
Personally, I met a woman who, when I knew her, had kids who were twenty, eighteen, fifteen and thirteen. She was thirty-two. You figure it out!
Gratuitous bump. There is more info now in this link.
Personally, I’m still less than totally convinced.
Why? The documentation is overwhelming.
I’m shocked in the link that the youngest father was 12 years old in 1998…I would have expected 9 or 10 years old, 12 is just to believable.
I’m rather ashamed to admit this, but I bought an issue of Cosmopolitan just to see how the other side lives, and in it was the story of an 11 year old girl who gave birth after being raped.
I guess it’s the most recent, Keira Knightly is on the cover.
I saw a Montel show where a 10 year old gave birth after being raped by her mother’s roommate’s 17 year old son. They interviewed the rapist in prison, and he started talking about how “she had a crush on me and was always sitting on my lap and dressing like Britany Spears.” Motel told him “I don’t care what she did, nobody can make you upzip your pants. And if that had been my daugher, I would be the one doing the interview behind bars, because you would be dead.”
Blaiming a 10 year old child when you impregnant her? 
I’m with samclem. Why?
This case has been well documented, and it’s not unheard of for children to develop as early as 8 months. With the medical technology we have now though, parents have the option of feeding their child some hormones (or hormone suppressant? I forget which) to delay or counteract the development. This is usually only done in cases where the child is really young though.
The snopes folks turned the thread into an article:
http://www.snopes.com/pregnant/medina.asp
I didn’t see it posted in here yet, so my apologies if I missed it.
Also beware that’s there’s a medical-like nude photo of the girl in question.
The translation of arriérée by disoriented is … misleading. The French term means ‘retarded’, which might serve to explain why this happened.
OK, I will readily admit to being wrong. I was taking the most likely choice to me given the facts that I had.
After all what is more believable:
a) A five-year-old gave birth or
b) Reports from over six decades ago, from a Third World Country (not that the term existed back then) that was–except for a very, very small number of people in the world–for all practical purposes as far away as the Moon,were inaccurate.
Option B seemed more plausible, but I had not seen the snopes article with the new photo.
I believe she was 11 when impregnated, 12 when she gave birth.
Her name is [REDACTED] and she lives in San Francisco. She’s now 33. Her circumstance is that she was raped in the school bathroom when she was 11. She says she doesn’t remember what happened and also remembers not knowing what was going on at all from the rape to the birth.
Huh. I had read this thread (even posted!) but oddly enough didn’t put the Cosmo story and this thread together until FilmGeek brought it up. I’m a girl so I can even admit to subscribing to Cosmo 