Girl, 13, gives birth to triplets fathered by 61-year-old man



A grown man is on the run after he impregnated a 13-year-old girl.The teen mother has given birth to triplets in the capital of Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. Authorities are looking for the 61-year-old father because they want to charge him with sexual abuse of a child.

The young mother said that she was "happy" with her three boys, who she named Samuel, Joshua and Jovanny. The three children are in the intensive care unit of a local hospital as they were born prematurely, but all are expected to survive.

The age of consent in the Dominican Republic is 18. However, the Dominican Republic has one of the highest teenage pregnancy rates in the world. More than 10 percent of 15 to 19-year-olds in the Dominican Republic are mothers, with hundreds of babies born to women under the age of 15-years-old each year.

The Dominican Republic’s Code of Minors has been recently revised and it strengthened provisions against child abuse, including physical and emotional abuse, sexual exploitation and child labor. The crimes of child abuse carries a sentence of between 20 to 30 years in prison and $2,000 to $10,000 fine.

There are special risks to a baby when the mother is not fully mature. Because most teenagers are not physically, emotionally, or financially ready to carry and care for a child, their babies tend to have low birth weight and are predisposed to a variety of illnesses.

Risks

Compared with mothers in older age groups, teenage mothers are at greater risk of having medical complications. Because the teenage mother is more likely to receive little or no prenatal care, she often becomes anemic and is more likely to develop preeclampsia, a severe condition associated with high blood pressure. Vitamin deficiencies are more common, and the teenage mother's weight gain is likely to be inadequate. Since the teenage mother is still growing herself, she needs to eat properly not only for her own growth but for normal growth of the fetus.

Pelvic bones do not reach their maximum size until about the age of 18; therefore, the pelvis of the teenage mother may not have grown enough to allow vaginal delivery of a normal-size baby. For this reason, the incidence of cesarean section is higher in teenage mothers -- a baby that can be delivered vaginally when the mother is 20 is often too large to have been delivered vaginally when she was 14 years old.

Babies born to teenage mothers are more likely to die in the first year of life compared with babies born to mothers older than 20 years of age.