11-year-old child expects a baby in Moscow

A fourth grader was concealing her pregnancy from teachers and classmates till the end of April

Doctors of one of Moscow's maternity hospitals have an extraordinary patient: an eleven-year-old girl is 30 weeks pregnant. The girl's only relatives - a grandmother and her 14-year-old boyfriend - often visit the little girl at the hospital.
The girl, named only as Valentina, a fourth grader, was concealing her pregnancy from teachers and classmates till the end of April. School teachers say that she started wearing loose tops - that is why no one at school could see that a child was bearing a child. The secret was unveiled later, when Valentina did not feel well at classes. When the girl was hospitalized, she never appeared at school again, the Moskovsky Komsomolets reports.
"The girl is not ready for childbirth either psychologically or physically. It is very hard for a child's organism to deal with such adult experience as pregnancy. The girl is having problems with kidneys. The underage mother is expecting a boy: the fetus is already 1300 grams heavy, which is relatively enough even for a grownup woman," doctors say.
The would-be mother is an orphan; the girl is being raised by her grandmother. "The family of the baby's father lives in another city, in Astrakhan. The boy visited Moscow with his parents when he was twelve," Valentina's grandmother said. "Of course I noticed that my girl was not feeling good. She started having nausea more than usual, although I originally missed it out of my attention, because Valentina is allergic to vegetables and fruit," the woman added.
The headmaster of Valentina's school said that she would do her best to let the girl complete her secondary education, after she gives birth to her child. "Underage parents are not allowed to get married. The Russian law allows to do it from the age of 18 only. The girl will not have a right to raise the baby all by herself. She will not be entitled to receive any benefits either: she can obtain mother's status from the age of 16, when she can be considered responsible for her child's life," Doctor of Medical Sciences, Mikhail Vinogradov said.
A similar incident of underage pregnancy was registered last year in Ukraine. Bogdana Korenkova, a sixth grader, became a mother at the age of eleven. Bogdana's mother, 28-year-old Larisa, apparently the world's youngest grandmother, had no place to live, after she was asked to move out of the flat that she rented. The young woman went to the city administration, but she was advised to give the child away to orphanage, Ivanovo-press website reports.
The underage mother was determined to keep the baby. The girl said that she would never give the baby away to anybody. The Ukrainian child-mother gave birth to a healthy baby boy by Cesarean section. It took 20 minutes for the operation to last.
"It became a unique occurrence indeed. The baby boy is absolutely healthy. He is a beautiful and quiet child," a doctor said.
Such premature pregnancy is extremely rare in medical practice. Extremely early childbirth was registered in 1910, when a couple of Chinese children became world's youngest parents: the father was nine years and the mother was eight.
A six-year-old girl from the USSR became world's youngest mother in 1930. The record was beaten in 1939, though, when five-year-old Lina Medina from Peru became a mother.

On the photo: Would-be parents Valentina and her boyfriend, Vlad