After Planned Parenthood shut its only Upper Peninsula clinic, a self-described “individually pro-life” urgent care doctor became Marquette’s only option for abortion care — and she’s not looking back.
MARQUETTE, Mich. Shawn Brown opened her urgent care clinic to treat ski injuries and strep throat. Then Planned Parenthood packed up and left, and the nearest abortion care for hundreds of miles walked right out the door with them.
Roughly 1,100 patients relied on the Marquette Planned Parenthood each year for cancer screenings, IUD insertions, and medication abortions. When it closed, there was no other resource. “It’s a 500-mile stretch of no access,” Brown said. WCMU Public Radio
So Brown who describes herself as “individually pro life” did something that surprises people when they first hear it. She started offering medication abortions at Marquette Medical Urgent Care. Between the tourists coming in with sprained ankles and the college kids with the flu, she carved out space for a service that had vanished from the Upper Peninsula entirely.
“It’s very strange for me to own the abortion clinic of the Upper Peninsula,” Brown said. But she knew from her years as an emergency medicine physician that medication abortions aren’t complicated to provide. “Clinically, I was never worried about it,” she said. “It’s first-trimester miscarriage management.” NPR
The clinic now sees roughly four abortion patients a week. That number is small, but the stories aren’t.
Dr. Viktoria Koskenoja, an emergency medicine physician who works at the clinic, described a patient who had ordered abortion pills online, gotten scared, and showed up at the urgent care with the medications still in her hand. “She just didn’t she wasn’t sure she could rely on the pills,” Koskenoja said. KFF Health News
It’s a scenario that points to something the telehealth push tends to gloss over. Michigan voters amended the state constitution in 2022 to protect abortion rights, and technically, care is available in the state. But “technically available” and “actually accessible” are two different things when you’re three hours from the nearest city, the Mackinac Bridge is iced over, and you’re scared.
“It annoys me that telehealth is considered an acceptable thing in rural areas,” Koskenoja said. “As though we’re not the human beings that like talking to human beings and looking someone in the eye, especially when something serious is going on.” WCMU Public Radio
The Marquette clinic’s story is part of a widening national crack in reproductive healthcare. At least 38 abortion clinics shut down last year in states where the procedure is still legal, according to data from I Need an A, a nonprofit project that tracks abortion access. WCMU Public Radio Planned Parenthood of Michigan cited the Trump administration’s cuts to Medicaid funding as a key driver of the closures not state law, but federal dollars drying up.
Telehealth abortions have exploded since the 2022 Dobbs decision, rising from 5 percent of all abortions to 25 percent by the end of 2024, according to the #WeCount national tracking project. WCMU Public Radio But that shift masks a geographic reality: people in rural communities, older patients, those with complications, and people who simply need to look a doctor in the eye before making a medical decision they’re left behind by an app and a mailing address.
Kimi Chernoby, chief operating and legal officer at FemInEM, said the idea that urgent cares “could be an untapped solution to closures for abortion clinics across the country is really exciting.” OPB
For now, it’s one clinic in a small port town on the southern shore of Lake Superior. The waiting room smells like antiseptic and there’s a kids’ corner with Legos. Nobody makes much noise about what else happens there. And that, maybe, is exactly the point.
