A 10-year-old Mexican girl from the San Francisco Totimehuacan community near the city of Puebla gave birth to a baby boy weighing 3.3 pounds at a Women’s Hospital after a pregnancy of 31 weeks. 

The hospital revealed the baby boy is in a good condition considering his premature birth and the mother is recovering well after first coming to the centre on October 22.

However, hospital director Rogelio Gonzalez said that the birth had been reported to the state's Attorney General's Office, which is investigating whether the girl could have been raped and who the father is.

Mexican laws

Mexican state laws prevent young mothers having abortions unless they can prove they were the victim of sexual assault.

The legal age of consent is 12 and women who have abortions in Puebla face a fine or prison sentence if they are unable to prove they were sexually abused. However, the laws are currently under review.

The shocking case is not the first of a young girl giving birth in Mexico.

In August last year, an 11-year-old known only as Amalia had a child two weeks prematurely after being raped repeatedly by her stepfather when she was 10-years-old.

When the girl's mother discovered her daughter was pregnant, she had a nervous breakdown and demanded to know how it happened, said local aid workers.

Amalia told her mother she had been raped by her stepfather and the attack was immediately reported to the police.

The city of Cancun had passed a law banning most elective abortions, but women's rights groups claimed the girl wasn't told by doctors that the new legislation allowed for rape victims to have abortions.

And in 1999, a 13-year-old rape victim became a cause celebre after medical authorities refused to give her the abortion she was entitled to by law. She later gave birth to the child. The girl, Paulina Ramirez, brought her case to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in 2002, drawing international attention and sparking a high-profile campaign seeking reparations from the Mexican government.