Sometimes an image of the day says everything by itself, and hardly needs any words of explanation or discussion. And sometimes there are images like the above, which is not interesting at all unless there's explanation AND discussion.
As I thought about this picture, I realized that it covers just about every subject we usually deal with here. What you're seeing is a picture from 1939. The five-year-old shown has given birth to the baby shown, by Caesarean.
The first instinct is
skepticism, a common subject for us. How do we know this really happened? The image comes from
this Reuters story, which presents it as known truth.
Snopes,
The Straight Dope Archives turn up nothing. Googling around gets us
this imprecise desciption from an unknown source on a suspect web site.
(Which adds: "Doctor Lozada has conducted very detailed studies since the diagnostic of the pregnancy which aroused much curiosity in the country; he took an x-ray of the child and her baby, established a diagnostic of the fetal situation, observed the state of functionality of the little mother who had begun menstruating at the age of 8 months. At four years old she had already developed breasts as well as pubic hair, her body proportions were a bit amazing and her bone hardening a bit advanced, things that are often observed in cases of such premature pregnancy." Yuck.)
Assuming that it was true, the story brings us other questions on topics we often talk about. The
government's role; the Reuters story talks about how the woman was pretty much neglected and asks the government to grant her a full lifetime pension. The
actual science behind it: is it possible? Could the girl's body accidentally go into adolescent hormone production in infancy? The
social science: what problems would a 5-year-old mom have? The
international aspects: what was Peru like then? How many bespectacled doctors were available to take an interest?
I'll skip the
adolescent ironic humor we sometimes add, figuring that at age five there's no room for it.