A woman, 37 weeks pregnant, gave birth in a car on Thursday afternoon while en route to Garcia de Orta Hospital in Almada. The vehicle was forced to stop on the side of the road shortly after 5 p.m., on a section of IC21 between Barreiro and the A2, for the baby’s delivery.
The woman, a resident of Barreiro, was heading to Almada because the obstetrics emergency services at Hospital de Nossa Senhora do Rosário were closed.
The INEM stated, “CODU received a call at 5:14 p.m. to assist a 37-week pregnant woman. There was no cooperation from the callers for triage, as they hung up the phone. CODU later called back and was informed that they would proceed to the hospital by their own means.”
The baby was born around this time. Fifteen minutes after the initial call, at 5:30 p.m., INEM received another call indicating the birth had occurred.
CODU dispatched a medical emergency and resuscitation vehicle and an ambulance to the location. By 6:13 p.m., the teams sent were transmitting the clinical data of both mother and child to CODU. The mother and newborn were then escorted to Garcia de Orta Hospital in Almada, their original destination.
The incident occurs on the same day that a Parliamentary Inquiry Commission into INEM was approved in the Assembly of the Republic to investigate recurring failures attributed to the institute. The proposal was put forward by Iniciativa Liberal and was met with abstentions from the government parties and the PS.
