- A year after announcing it was shuttering four clinics, Planned Parenthood said it would close three more facilities, effective immediately
- Leaders blamed the closure on federal funding cuts
- Planned Parenthood will continue to operate its virtual clinic, which it opened in 2023
LANSING — Three more of Michigan’s abortion clinics closed Thursday, further reshaping in-person abortion care as more people turn to virtual care and online-order abortion pills.
Planned Parenthood of Michigan announced Thursday it would close clinics, effective immediately, in Lansing, Livonia and Warren. None of the three clinics provided procedural abortions, it said.
Planned Parenthood’s board of directors voted to close the clinics earlier this summer, she said, but staff and patients were not notified until Thursday.
“We notified everybody as soon as we could, which was today,” Paula Thornton Greear, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Michigan, told Bridge.
The announcement comes a year after the network provider of sexual health and reproductive care announced it was closing three clinics in northern Michigan and one of two in Ann Arbor. Planned Parenthood provides medical services and education to nearly 60,000 Michiganders each year, according to its materials.
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The latest round of closures leaves seven Michigan brick-and-mortar clinics for Planned Parenthood — down from 14 in recent years, even as independent providers say they are struggling to keep their brick-and-mortar doors open, too.
Notably, Planned Parenthood will continue to operate its “largest clinic,” a virtual clinic.
It launched in 2023 soon after the Biden administration cleared the way for mail-order pills. By last year, about 29% of the nation’s abortions were happening by telehealth, according to a #WeCount report by the Society of Family Planning.
“That speaks to the changing health care delivery landscape,” Thornton Greear told Bridge.
A shifting backdrop
Like other providers, Planned Parenthood has been trying to adjust its business plans to a new abortion landscape after dramatic changes in federal abortion policy and the US Supreme Court’s 2022 decision that upended federal law and sent the question of abortion back to the states.
Facing deep federal funding cuts, Planned Parenthood’s leaders in May had unsuccessfully requested $5 million in emergency funding from the Whitmer administration.
They blamed Thursday’s closure on a $4.2 million decline in patient care reimbursement and federal family planning funding over the fiscal year and an “unsustainable” $5.6 million in uncompensated and undercompensated care.”
“That’s not a gap that any organization our size can endure and keep its footprint intact,” Thornton Greear said, calling the decision “incredibly difficult.”
“It’s a hard thing to say out loud. It’s even harder for the staff who have cared for patients in those buildings and the patients who got their care there,” she said.
Right to Life of Michigan President Amber Roseboom called Planned Parenthood’s reference to financial problems “preposterous” and “shameful political theater,” in a statement released soon after the announcement.
According to a recent report by the news site Politico, Planned Parenthood’s national political action committee has $47 million to spend in this year’s elections.
“If Planned Parenthood is facing closures, they should be pointing to mismanagement of their own national organization, not the government,” Roseboom said.
In a post on X Thursday, Whitmer blamed the Planned Parenthood closures on “DC Republicans’ historic attacks on reproductive freedom, health care access, and Medicaid.”
State Rep. Laurie Pohutsky, D-Livonia, responded on X, saying Whitmer shares responsibility for the closures. Pohutsky said the governor “ignored Planned Parenthood’s pleas for help and legislators’ plans for how you could help fund them while trying to use them as leverage to appease Donald Trump.”
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