Contributor: ATTWN Staff
Your local urgent care clinic may start offering abortions, like one is currently doing in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, after the Planned Parenthood in town closed.
Key Takeaways:
- In April, Planned Parenthood of Michigan closed its Marquette, MI abortion clinic.
- Local medical professionals came up with the idea to do medical abortions at an urgent care clinic in Marquette.
- The State Attorney General is fully on board and wants to figure out how to implement this elsewhere.
Planned Parenthood of Michigan closed its abortion facility in Marquette in April, and now local medical professionals are heralding their unique solution to the problem of women not being able to get abortions there: offering abortions at an urgent care facility.
“Abortion is not healthcare, and it’s certainly not appropriate for an urgent care facility. Patients coming in for a sprained ankle or hand burn aren’t the same as a woman seeking an abortion. Do all the urgent care staff know they are now working at an abortion facility?” said Abby Johnson, CEO and Founder of And Then There Were None and ProLove Ministries.
The supposed catalyst for this new urgent-care-turned-abortion-facility, named Marquette Medical Urgent Care Clinic, was the closing of Planned Parenthood in Marquette, Michigan.
The doctor at the urgent care facility, Dr. Viktoria Koskenoja, proudly told the local news: “We created a system to deliver abortions out of an urgent care, which has never been done before in the country, as far as we know.”
Suppose women and their families need actual healthcare. In that case, there are three federally qualified health centers within 10 miles of Marquette, MI, according to FindAHealthCenter.gov, that do not participate in abortions. Additionally, multiple pregnancy care centers in the Upper Peninsula offer pregnancy services to women at no cost.
One of the obstacles that stood in the way of the urgent care offering abortions was malpractice insurance. Initially, they were quoted upwards of $60,000 a year for that specific type of insurance, but the clinic was able to shop around and get a much lower rate thanks to an aggressive insurance agent.
And the state Attorney General, Dana Nessel, was fully on board with abortions being done at the urgent care clinic, so much so that she “suggested she reach out to the director of the state’s Department of Insurance and Financial Services to see if the deal Dr. Koskenoja and Brown worked out could be more easily implemented with care facilities statewide or across the country.
“While I can’t make any promises — all I can say is I can try, right?” said the AG, as reported by MyUPNow. “What these folks have done here in Marquette has been really impressive. Let’s see what we can do to help them as much as possible.”
If urgent care clinics in the country start pursuing the route of abortions next to strep throat and broken wrist treatments, the pro-life movement will need to pivot quickly, mobilizing resources in many, many more areas of the nation. According to ClinicView, there are nearly 12,000 urgent care clinics in the United States and about 765 abortion clinics. That is much more ground to cover for the pro-life movement.
“As a pro-life movement, we must reach women before they walk into an abortion clinic or order abortion pills online,” said Abby Johnson. “If standing outside urgent care facilities that do abortions is one of the ways to reach those women and clinic workers, then that’s what we will do. Women deserve so much better than abortion. And abortion clinic workers deserve to work at places that do not terminate innocent lives.”