Abortions in Portugal Hold Steady at 18,869 in 2025, With One Lisbon Clinic Doing a Third of Those on Request and 44 Percent for Foreign Women

Portugal recorded 18,869 terminations of pregnancy in 2025, a figure the Direção-Geral da Saúde (DGS, Directorate-General of Health) describes as stable after three years of increases. The annual report on the national register, dated 25 September, also shows that more than a third of the terminations carried out at a woman's request took place at a single private clinic in Lisbon, and that 44.2 percent were for women who are not Portuguese nationals.

The Relatório do Registo das Interrupções da Gravidez 2025 (Report on the Register of Pregnancy Terminations) is built from the forms every hospital and clinic must send to the DGS after each procedure. The data are anonymous and used only for public health statistics. This account is taken from the report itself.

Numbers flat, rate steady

The 2025 total was 0.01 percent below 2024. That works out at roughly 8 terminations per 1,000 women aged 15 to 49, a rate the DGS says is stable, and about 215 per 1,000 live births, down about 4 percent on the year.

Almost all of them, 18,239 or 96.7 percent, were at the woman's request within the first 10 weeks of pregnancy, the ground created by the 2007 law. The second most common ground, serious illness or malformation of the foetus, accounted for 495 (2.6 percent).

The median pregnancy was 7 weeks along. The DGS recorded no case in which a termination at the woman's request went beyond the 10-week limit.

One clinic, a third of the total

Thirty-six health establishments registered terminations in 2025, and 32 of them performed terminations at the woman's request, one fewer than in 2024. The Unidade Local de Saúde (ULS, local health unit) of Cova da Beira, in Covilhã, sent no records at all for 2025. The hospital in Ponta Delgada, in the Azores, resumed registering, including back data for 2024.

Public hospitals and health centres carried out 66 percent of the terminations at a woman's request. The rest, 6,204, were done in the private sector, and all of them at one establishment: the Clínica dos Arcos in Lisbon. That is 34 percent of the national total. The private share rose by 2 percentage points on 2024.

Part of that private activity comes through the public system. Of the 6,204 private procedures, 2,455 were referred by public hospitals, and the report says the share of private terminations referred by public hospitals has been rising for several years. The DGS's own list of providers, updated on 27 August, shows several local health units, among them Cova da Beira and Castelo Branco, sending women to the Lisbon clinic for the procedure itself. In August we reported that the Garcia de Orta hospital in Almada had suspended its own service and was referring patients to a private clinic, and in September that the health inspectorate had opened a formal case.

The two sectors work differently. Public establishments used medication in 97.7 percent of cases. At the private clinic, 62.9 percent were surgical, the lowest share the register has recorded, down 1.7 points. Nationally, 77.1 percent of terminations used medication.

Short waits, long journeys

Waiting times were short. Women waited an average of 2.8 days for the first appointment (median one day), and an average of 6 days between that appointment and the procedure (median five). The rules require at least three days of reflection in between. More than half the women (51.9 percent) went straight to the establishment that carried out the termination, without a referral.

Where a woman lives still matters. Residents of Lisboa e Vale do Tejo accounted for 54.8 percent of terminations at a woman's request, and 57.2 percent were carried out there. In the Alentejo, 49 percent of women had to travel to another region, and in the Azores 34.2 percent. The Alentejo has improved since a service opened on its coast in 2024: in 2023 only about 27 percent of its residents were treated in their own region, against 51 percent in 2025.

Who the women were

The average age was 28.5, and the rate was highest among women aged 20 to 24, at 15 per 1,000. Women aged 15 to 19 accounted for 7.7 percent. Twenty-five terminations were for girls under 15, aged 13 and 14, two fewer than in 2024.

Most women (78.5 percent) had completed secondary or higher education. Half (50.5 percent) already had children, and 71.5 percent said it was their first termination. The most common work situations were unskilled work (22.9 percent), administrative and service jobs (18.6 percent), unemployment (14.4 percent) and study (13.5 percent). The share who were unemployed has been rising for six years.

Nationality: a rising share that tracks births

Of the terminations at a woman's request, 10,158 (55.7 percent) were for Portuguese women and 8,059 (44.2 percent) for women of other nationalities; 22 forms did not say. Among the non-Portuguese, the largest groups were Angolan (20.9 percent), Brazilian (19.7 percent) and Cape Verdean (14.6 percent).

The DGS says the foreign share has grown over the past five years alongside the growth in the number of foreign women of childbearing age and of babies born to foreign mothers. Measured against births, the rate for non-Portuguese women has been stable over the same period, it says, although in 2025 it was higher than for Portuguese women. The report calls for services that are "accessible, inclusive and adapted to linguistic, social and cultural diversity" to reduce the barriers foreign women face in getting information and care.

The DGS's information for the public states that immigrant women have the same right of access to termination as Portuguese women, whatever their legal status. Our guide Getting an Abortion in Portugal sets out how the process works.

Contraception after the procedure

The DGS also dwells on contraception. In 2025, 10.9 percent of women chose no contraceptive method after a termination at their request, the highest share in the series and up from 7.5 percent in 2022. Just over a third (35.9 percent) chose a long-acting method such as an intrauterine device, an implant or tubal ligation; that share was 40.3 percent in public establishments and 27.2 percent at the private clinic.

Only 27.4 percent of the women said they had had a contraception appointment in the previous year. That was up 1.2 points on 2024, the first rise after a decade of decline from 43.8 percent in 2015.

The DGS points out that contraception, including emergency contraception, is free in the Serviço Nacional de Saúde (SNS, National Health Service), at family planning appointments in health centres and in hospitals. It recommends strengthening the referral network between levels of care and considering moving the first termination appointment into primary care, so that women are seen closer to home and followed up afterwards.

The report notes one change of method: Statistics Portugal (INE) now estimates the resident population from administrative records, and has revised its series for 2021 to 2024; the report's rates use the new figures.