ASUNCION, Paraguay, August 14, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) – The 11-year-old girl at the centre of a fierce international lobby effort to abort her child – allegedly conceived in rape – gave birth by C-section on August 13 to a healthy daughter.
According to NDTV, the tiny mother, who is 4 foot 6 inches tall and whose pre-pregnancy weight was 75 pounds, named her baby Milagros – the Spanish word for “miracles.”
The girl, identified only as Mainumby, and her infant daughter are doing well, according to Mario Villalba, director of the Red Cross-run Reina Sofia maternity hospital in Asuncion, where Mainumby has been receiving care.
The baby was delivered at 37 weeks gestation and has been variously reported in the media as weighing 6.6 and 7.8 pounds at birth.
“It was like any other Caesarean, but with the age difference,” Villalba said in The Guardian. “She’s well and progressing like in any other surgery, but we’ll see afterwards how she gets on as a mother.”
The U.K. news source also reported that Elizabeth Torales, lawyer for Mainumby’s mother, is seeking to have Mainumby and her baby released to the custody of the 11-year-old’s mother.
The girl was allegedly raped and impregnated at age 10 by 42-year-old Gilberto Benitez Zárate, described variously in the press as her stepfather and her mother’s boyfriend.
Benitez was arrested in May and is awaiting trial on charges of rape and abuse of a child. According to NDTV, he faces between 12 to 15 years in prison if convicted.
Mainumby was found to be 20 weeks pregnant in late April when her mother took her to hospital with stomach cramps. The girl’s mother then asked for an abortion for her daughter but was refused. She was subsequently arrested and charged with negligence.
Although the charges remain, the Guardian stated that the mother was later released and “spent the past 10 days at her daughter’s bedside.”
Pro-abortion and women’s rights groups took up the case as a cause celebre for abortion, with the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights assembling experts “demanding” that the girl be allowed to abort her child, and Amnesty International charging it was “torture” to let Mainumby to carry her child to term.
But Paraguayan authorities refused to abort Mainumby’s child.
The predominately Catholic country’s constitution protects human life from the moment of conception, with the only exception being when the mother’s life is in jeopardy.
Click “like” if you are PRO-LIFE!
“We’re in total disagreement with regard to the possibility of interrupting the pregnancy,” Minister of Health Antonio Barrios told CNN at the time. “The girl is being continuously attended to. She’s in a shelter. She’s being examined regularly, and she is going through a pregnancy that has been on course until now without problems.”
And Archbishop of Ascuncion Edmundo Valenzuela, the Guardian noted, rebuked the abortion lobby in a May 14 Independence Day homily, denouncing it as a force of “barbarism, dehumanisation, and a culture of death.”
Some observers point out that Mainumby’s story highlights the prevalence of child rape in the Latin American country. Paraguay’s health officials state that about 600 girls under age 14 annually become pregnant in a country of just under 7 million people.
Mainumby’s mother reportedly told authorities in 2014 that her daughter was being abused, but later withdrew the allegations, noted Paraguayan mother Andrea Rodil in a LifeSiteNews report.
Rodil pointed out that “it is time for the government to enact substantive solutions to child abuse.” That means “we must strengthen the family headed by a father and a mother.”
“While comprehensive and compassionate care for the young girl and her baby are laudable, it is only putting out one fire which unfortunately will break out again,” she wrote. “More must be done to address the roots of the tragedy that this girl and so many other children like her have to suffer.”