By SUE ELLEN ROSS – Staff Reporter

€ The youngest mother in the world was five years old when she delivered a full-term 6 lb. baby boy in Lima, Peru in May 1939.

Lina Medina, who is now 69, has lived in poverty before and since the birth. She received many offers from both her country and the United States promising recognition and notoriety, but nothing came through. Currently, an obstetrician from Peru, Dr. Jose Sandoval, became interested in her case and is the author of a book, ‘Mother Aged 5.’

Medina has long refused to visit the past, and will not grant interviews. The son she delivered while still a youngster, Gerardo, died in 1979 at the age of 40.

She has another son, and she and her husband live in a cramped house in a crime-ridden district of Lima. Neither Lina nor her family have ever received anything from the government, according to Sandoval.

The doctor hopes to bring her story to the public eye and possibly help her to receive some type of belated assistance.

“The government condemned them to live in poverty,” he said. “In any other country, they would be the objects of special care.”

Medina’s experience has been confirmed by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. No one has ever established the identify of Gerardo’s father.

€ The oldest mother in the world is a retired Schoolteacher. Satyabhama Mahapatra, from Nayagarh in Orissa. She beat the current record-holder by two years.

Mahapatra, 65, gave birth to a 6 lb. 8 oz. healthy baby boy in the spring of 2003. He was delivered by Caesarean Section at a private home, according to the Times of India.

The case is all the more remarkable by the fact that Indian women average a life expectancy rate of slightly more than 63 years.

Previously, the oldest mother in the world was 63-year-old Arceli Keh of Highland, California (located 60 miles east of Los Angeles.) She and her 60-year-old husband Isagani immigrated from the Philippines to California and had been married for 16 years before she became pregnant in1996.

“I wasn’t looking to make history,” she told The Express, a London newspaper last year. “I just wanted a baby.”