CEDAW/C/50/D/22/2009 doubt concerning the exhaustion of prior remedies, preference is given to the application for amparo. 4.4 Finally, the State party notes that, with regard to the implementation of article 1969 of the Civil Code, the author could have filed court proceedings to request compensation for damages and harm because the alleged victim did not receive timely medical treatment. Author’s comments on the State party’s observations on admissibility 5.1 In her comments of 1 February 2010, the author referred to international jurisprudence in the area of exhaustion of domestic remedies and maintains that, in accordance with that jurisprudence, the effectiveness of a remedy rests on whether it can be adapted to the situation of vulnerability of the victim, the circumstances of a particular case and the objective to be attained according to the right violated. 5.2 In accordance with its regulations under article 53 of the Code of Constitutional Procedure, proceedings for the remedy of amparo should not exceed 10 working days from the acceptance of the request. However, there are various procedural problems that undermine the desired speed of this proceeding. First, the Code does not establish a deadline for the judge to accept the request. As a result, that time period is dependent on the subjective importance the judge attaches to the case, in addition to his caseload. Second, at the time the events took place, the existing system for service of documents was to designate a private individual or institution to carry out the personal delivery of any judicial order. This system turned out to be highly problematic, which led the State to adopt a reform programme beginning in 2008 to expedite service. This led to some progress but in general the problem persists. Third, article 53 provides for the possibility of holding an oral hearing, but does not establish a deadline for requesting such a hearing, nor for the judge to grant it, nor does it allow the judge to call a hearing on his own initiative. 5.3 According to the author, between May 2003 and August 2008, only six petitions for amparo concerning the protection of the right to health were reviewed by the Constitutional Court. The case that took the least amount of time to settle at first instance took two months and 16 days and the longest one year. Based on these precedents, a minimum of two months could be expected in order to obtain a decision at first instance. When L.C. finally received a response from the hospital refusing the termination of the pregnancy, 56 days had already gone by since her suicide attempt. Waiting another 60 to 90 days to obtain a court decision requiring the hospital to perform the termination of pregnancy and the subsequent spinal operation would only have worsened her clinical status and would have had no effect whatever on preventing or repairing the harm already experienced. After L.C. miscarried (16 June 2007), the hospital did not schedule the surgery until almost a month later (11 July 2007). By then the violation of the right to have the operation had ceased but the damage was already irreversible. Therefore, it made even less sense to initiate a petition for amparo, since the request would have rightly been declared to be without merit. The author concludes that the remedy of amparo consequently is not an effective remedy in this type of case. 5.4 The author also notes that the prior methods used in the present case, the internal administrative proceedings within the hospital and the complaint to the Women’s Rights Defender, also did not constitute an appropriate mechanism, since under the regulations they were not administrative proceedings intended, as part of due process, to address requests for legal termination of pregnancy. 7