Portugal's rules give a fertility clinic six months to wind down. Ovom Care in Cascais took a day
The Cascais clinic has gone insolvent and patients learned through its own app that their frozen embryos are moving elsewhere. Portugal's regulator requires six months' notice and a destination it picks itself.
Ovom Care opened in Cascais in 2025 on venture capital money and has now filed for insolvency. Dozens of patients found out through the clinic’s own app that their frozen embryos and gametes are being moved to another centre in Lisbon. The phones stopped being answered. The emails go nowhere.
In twenty years of Portugal’s assisted-reproduction law, no fertility clinic had gone under before.
Six months, and a destination the regulator picks
A licensed centre cannot simply switch off the lights. The rulebook that sets operating conditions for these centres, issued by the national assisted-reproduction council, requires every centre to give six months’ notice of closure to the government member responsible for health, and to take the steps needed to move cryopreserved gametes, gonadal tissue and embryos, along with the clinical and laboratory records that go with them, to a receiving body the health authority has designated in advance.
None of that happened here. The court decision dates from 27 August. The regulator only heard about it days later, second-hand, and by then patients had already been told their biological material was going to a Lisbon clinic, with no explanation of who decided that or on what basis.
What patients can actually do
Ovom drew heavily on patients from abroad, a large share of them British. Portugal has spent the past few years becoming a cross-border fertility destination on the strength of shorter waiting lists and lower prices than the UK, and it is those patients now trying to work out where their embryos are and who answers for them.
Two things are tangled together here and they behave very differently. The biological material has a regulated path and does end up at another licensed centre. Money already paid for treatment that never happened does not: it joins the ordinary queue of insolvency creditors, with no priority, and rarely comes back whole.
Anyone with material in storage can check the public register of authorised assisted-reproduction centres to confirm the named destination really is licensed, and should hold on to every piece of paper: consent forms, receipts, lab reports, and the app messages themselves.
It lands in a health system where hospital teleconsultations have run far ahead of pre-pandemic levels without in-person capacity keeping pace, and where parliament spent this year arguing over how women are treated around childbirth. The difference is that what sits in a freezer cannot simply be rescheduled.
Image: Karbohut / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
