Ambulance Births Doubled in Portugal Last Year, and on Monday a Baby Arrived on the A9 After the Nearest Maternity Closed

A baby girl was born in an ambulance on the A9 motorway on Monday morning, delivered by the Bombeiros Voluntários de Benavente (Benavente Volunteer Firefighters) at kilometre 28.6 at around 09:37 as the crew raced towards the Hospital Beatriz Ângelo in Loures. She never reached a maternity ward because the one nearest her family had already closed. It is exactly the kind of birth that has become far more common in Portugal over the past year.

According to figures from INEM (the National Institute of Medical Emergency), 60 babies were born in ambulances or other emergency vehicles in 2025, up from 28 the year before — a jump of 114%. Counting every birth its crews assisted before reaching hospital, INEM recorded 277 pre-hospital deliveries in 2025, including 23 on public roads. It was the highest tally on record, and the cases were concentrated in the Lisboa e Vale do Tejo and Centro regions.

Why the nearest maternity was shut

The mother on the A9 lived in the catchment of the Hospital de Vila Franca de Xira, whose obstetrics and gynaecology emergency service closed at the end of March 2026. The closure was confirmed on 5 March by the executive director of the Serviço Nacional de Saúde (SNS, National Health Service), Álvaro Almeida, who folded the service into Portugal’s first regional obstetrics and gynaecology emergency unit — a shared service physically based at Hospital Beatriz Ângelo in Loures.

That decision left roughly a quarter of a million people across five municipalities — Vila Franca de Xira, Alenquer, Arruda dos Vinhos, Azambuja and Benavente — without a nearby emergency maternity, adding around 35 kilometres and half an hour to the journey for a woman in labour. Local mayors said they had been “totally disregarded,” and Azambuja’s council passed a formal motion of repudiation. Vila Franca de Xira still handles scheduled deliveries and routine appointments; what it lost was the round-the-clock emergency door.

The official reason is a shortage of specialists. Almeida argued that even if the SNS hired every obstetrician registered with the professional order, it could still cover only about 70% of the hours needed to keep all of the country’s obstetric emergency rooms open at once — so, in his telling, concentrating the service was the only way to keep it safe.

A summer of rotating closures

The Vila Franca de Xira case is not isolated. Through the summer of 2026, roughly half of the obstetric emergency rooms in the Lisbon region have closed on any given weekend, forcing expectant mothers to be redirected — sometimes across the river or up the coast. The obstetric emergency at Hospital São Francisco Xavier has been accepting only INEM-referred patients through August, Santarém’s unit shut for several days in July, and Leiria’s took only referred cases in the first half of August. The SNS director has acknowledged “constraints” in the new regional units but insists they “never closed.”

What this means for expats

• Your nearest hospital may not deliver babies: if you live outside the big city centres — in the Lezíria, the Oeste or the interior — check now which hospital actually runs a 24-hour obstetric emergency, because it may not be the one closest to you.
• In an emergency, call 112: the INEM dispatcher decides where you go, and crews are trained to deliver en route if they must. Do not simply drive to the nearest hospital assuming its maternity is open.
• Plan around the summer rosters: weekend and August closures rotate between hospitals, so a due date in peak season is worth discussing with your doctor in advance, along with a backup hospital.
• Know the system before you need it: our guide to having a baby in Portugal walks through SNS prenatal care, public versus private maternity, registering the birth and claiming parental benefits.

The government frames the concentration of obstetric services as a matter of safety in a country that simply does not have enough obstetricians to staff every door. For the families of the Lezíria do Tejo — and for the next baby born at speed on a motorway — the trade-off is measured in kilometres and minutes. With the obstetrician shortage unresolved and doctors warning that “each summer will be worse,” the pattern that produced Monday’s birth on the A9 shows little sign of easing.