During the last year of the third decade in the twentieth century, history was made. A five-year-old girl named Lina Medina gave birth to a healthy baby boy. While the circumstances of the girl’s birth were incestuous, the fact that the child from the remote Peruvian village was able to become pregnant and give birth was absolutely miraculous. Because no one could understand the circumstances of the birth, the child’s mother did not even recognize the pregnancy despite Lina’s growing belly because it was just not something anyone had ever considered.
Analysis of Lina Medina’s case indicates that she might have reached sexual maturity as young as eight-months-old to three-years-old. Either way, there was one unverified report that she had a menstrual period at the age of three.
When Lina’s medical case made international news, the Peruvian family found themselves with lucrative offers to take their show on the road to the United States. Americans wanted to view the “freak show,” and because of this, Lina and her family refused the cash offers. Instead, the child’s mother lived a reclusive life.
Lina’s son was named Gerardo, who took the name of the doctor who took care of the young mother. Because his family wanted to protect Gerardo from the truth, he spent his childhood thinking Lina was his big sister. This wasn’t far from the truth since she was only five at the time of his birth.
Gerardo did one interview in 1955 and said that he hoped to be a doctor when he grew up. However, he died at the young age of 40 in 1979.
Meanwhile, Lina went on to live a normal life in Peru. She married a man named Raul and had a second child in 1972 at the age of 39.