San Jose - A nine-year-old girl who is pregnant after being raped on a coffee plantation in Costa Rica will not have an abortion, her doctors have decided.
Dubbed "Rosa" by her physicians to protect her identity, the girl - whose family came here as migrant labourers from poorer neighbouring Nicaragua - is under observation at a San Jose public hospital in this small, predominantly Roman Catholic Central American country.
After medical exams and psychiatric care, doctors decided abortion was out of the question given her condition and under Costa Rican law, which bans abortion after 12 weeks.
Allegedly raped by a 20-year-old farmhand in Turrialba, east of the capital, "Rosa" is now 12 weeks pregnant.
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'Her pregnancy is proceeding normally' "From three months into the pregnancy, the law does not allow for abortions, and in any case it would not be prudent," said Henry Troper, one of her paediatricians, without addressing the fact that her pregnancy would be close to mandated deadlines for abortion here.
"Her pregnancy is proceeding normally. We are going to monitor her and the fetus very carefully. It is a very delicate situation," allowed Gerardo Escalante, the director of the maternity unit at the hospital.
"This girl does not know what has happened to her, and does not know what is ahead of her. She is going to need very special attention," so psychological care will be key in coming months, said Eliseo Vargas, head of the Costa Rican Social Security network that runs the hospital.
Escalante said doctors had recommended that she go home with her parents, since remaining in the hospital would be even more traumatic than the close follow-up care she will require.
But that may not be easy because her parents - mildly alarmed by the media frenzy her case has stirred in this normally quiet country - want to go back to Nicaragua to escape the media spotlight.
'Nno child can be killed, even if it is to save the life of the mother'
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