Providing abortions was the last thing Shawn Brown thought she’d be doing when she opened an urgent care clinic in this remote town in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

But she also wasn’t expecting the Planned Parenthood in Marquette to shut down last spring. Roughly 1,100 patients relied on that clinic each year for cancer screenings, IUD insertions, and medication abortions. Now the area has no other in-person resource for abortions. “It’s a 500-mile stretch of no access,” Brown said.

So the doctor, who describes herself as “individually pro-life,” added medication abortions to Marquette Medical Urgent Care’s already busy practice, which treats a steady flow of kids with the flu, college students with migraines, and tourists with skiing injuries.

At least 38 abortion clinics shut down last year in states where they’re still legal, according to data collected by I Need an A, a project supported by a number of nonprofits that helps people find abortion options. Even states that recently passed constitutional amendments protecting abortion rights, such as Michigan, have had clinics close since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. And as rural hospitals shutter labor and delivery units, patients are losing access to pregnancy care. “You cannot have a high-risk pregnancy up here,” Brown said. “It’s a scary place.”

Now communities are coming up with alternatives, such as Brown’s urgent care.

The idea that urgent cares “could be an untapped solution to closures for abortion clinics across the country is really exciting,” said Kimi Chernoby, the chief operating and legal officer at FemInEM, a national nonprofit that works to improve professional training and patient outcomes for women in emergency medicine.

One patient at the Marquette urgent care on a recent day was a woman whom KFF Health News agreed to identify by only her first initial, “A,” to protect her medical privacy. She drove more than an hour on snowy backroads while her kids were in day care to get to her appointment.

Read the full article about abortion care gaps in rural areas by Kate Wells at KFF Health News.