translated from Spanish: A girl as young as 13 died after giving birth in Nicaragua

A 13-year-old girl died after giving birth in a poor municipality in southeastern Nicaragua, the local government reported on Saturday. The girl’s heart stopped (hypovolemic shock) as a result of a “postpartum hemorrhage, due to tearing of the uterus, plus uterine atony”, that is, that the uterus did not contract after childbirth, according to the report of the Ministry of Salud.La girl gave birth vaginally to a baby on Friday, according to official information , in a rural community in the municipality of Laguna de Perlas, in the Southern Caribbean Autonomous Region (RACS), one of the poorest and most isolated areas of Nicaragua.Cases of teenage pregnancy are not uncommon in this Central American country.According to the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), Central America and the Caribbean rank “second in teenage pregnancy , after Africa, with a rate close to 100 pregnancies per 1,000 adolescents.” Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, the Dominican Republic, and Guyana are “the countries with the highest adolescent fertility rates,” according to PAHO data. In Nicaragua, the percentage of women aged 20 to 24 who married or found themselves in a union before the age of 18 exceeds 30%, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has warned. PAHO maintains that “maternal mortality is one of the leading causes of death among adolescents and young women aged 15 to 24 in the Region of the Americas.” Nicaragua’s Penal Code provides that any sexual relationship with a girl under the age of 14 is classified as rape and shall be punishable by 12 to 15 years’ imprisonment. Nicaraguan laws also consider statutory rape to be committed when an adult has sexual relations with minors between the ages of 14 and 16, even when there is no violence or intimidation. Abortion is also totally prohibited in the Central American country. Nicaraguan authorities did not report on the father of the surviving girl

Original source in Spanish