[article]
In Marquette, Michigan, a remote town in the state's Upper Peninsula, an urgent care doctor who describes herself as "individually pro-life" has started offering medication abortions. Shawn Brown opened Marquette Medical Urgent Care to treat the usual stream of flu cases, migraines, and ski injuries. Then the local Planned Parenthood shut down last spring, leaving roughly 1,100 patients without access to cancer screenings, IUD insertions, and abortion care. "It's a 500-mile stretch of no access," Brown told KFF Health News.
At least 38 abortion clinics closed last year in states where the procedure is still legal, according to data from I Need an A, a nonprofit project that helps people locate abortion services. The closures have hit rural areas especially hard. Even Michigan, which passed a constitutional amendment protecting abortion rights after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, has seen providers disappear. The simultaneous shuttering of rural hospital labor and delivery units has compounded the problem. "You cannot have a high-risk pregnancy up here," Brown said. "It's a scary place."
For patients like one woman identified only as "A" to protect her privacy, the urgent care clinic has become a lifeline. She drove more than an hour on snowy backroads while her children were in day care. She had gotten pregnant while on a progestin-only birth control pill and said another baby was "just not something that we could really do even at this time." She chose the in-person visit over a telemedicine option because receiving care in an office felt more secure than getting medication shipped by someone she had never met.
The model is drawing attention from medical professionals nationwide. Kimi Chernoby, chief operating and legal officer at FemInEM, a nonprofit focused on improving patient outcomes for women in emergency medicine, called the idea that urgent care clinics "could be an untapped solution to closures for abortion clinics across the country" genuinely exciting.
The Marquette clinic illustrates both the adaptability and the fragility of reproductive health care in rural America. Providers like Brown are filling a gap not out of ideological conviction but out of practical necessity — because no one else is there to do it.
