- Planned Parenthood of Michigan is closing three clinics in Marquette, Jackson, Petoskey this month, as well as consolidating its two Ann Arbor sites into one and cutting 10% of total staff.
- Leaders cited ongoing financial challenges, including the Trump administration freezing Title X funding.
- PPMI also pledged to expand telehealth capacity by 40% by summer.
Planned Parenthood of Michigan is closing its health centers in Marquette, Jackson, and Petoskey, and consolidating its two Ann Arbor clinics into one site. It’s also cutting 10% of staff, including 22 positions across both administrative and clinical roles.
Leaders cited ongoing financial challenges, compounded by President Donald Trump’s administration freezing Title X family planning funding for Planned Parenthood, as well as fears of potential Medicaid cuts.
“While we can legally provide abortion care here in Michigan, the ability to really maintain affordable access across all services still depends heavily on programs like Title X and Medicaid,” said PPMI president and CEO Paula Thornton Greear on Friday.
Michigan’s voter-backed 2022 ballot initiative, Proposal 3, “protects the right, but not necessarily the accessibility or affordability of care, as these funding cuts, these existential threats come to fruition,” she said.
If the Trump administration makes the Title X (a federal program providing low and no-cost family planning services, via grant funding for thousands of clinics across the country) funding freeze permanent, Planned Parenthood of Michigan would lose about $5.4 million annually, or about 16% of its 2025 budget, according to a spokesperson.
And historically, about 28% of PPMI’s patients receive Medicaid. “The reality is that insurance reimbursement rates across the board are low,” Thornton Greear said. “It’s been that way for a while. When you start looking at the costs to run a healthcare organization, from supply costs, etc., when you layer on these funding impacts, it creates a chasm that’s impossible to fill.”
Chief Medical Operating Officer Dr. Sarah Wallett said the cuts are a difficult, but a necessary, strategic decision.
“I don't want to downplay that it is a loss,” she said. “I take it very seriously, and I know that there are real-life impacts for our staff and for our patients. We are making these changes because of the pressures that we are under with the Trump administration in place. This is not a position I wish we were in, but that is the reality. … We are anticipating threats to our ability to continue to accept Medicaid insurance.”
What does this mean for abortion, reproductive health access in Michigan?
PPMI provided care to more than 51,500 patients in the 2024 fiscal year, according to a spokesperson. (About 10,500 of those were through telehealth, including PPMI’s virtual health center.)
Petoskey and Marquette each saw about 1,000 in-person patients per year, with just over 2,000 in-person patients coming annually to the Jackson clinic and about 3,400 at the Ann Arbor West site that’s being consolidated.
“The three health centers in the communities of Marquette, Petoskey and Jackson are our smallest health centers that saw the fewest number of patients,” Wallett said. “Those patients are important. Their healthcare is important. But operationally, because of their small size, [they] are the most difficult to operate.”
None of the health centers being closed currently offer procedural abortions, but they do provide medication abortion, birth control, STD testing and treatment, pregnancy testing and planning, as well as a range of other health services.
That will leave 10 brick-and-mortar Planned Parenthood clinics remaining in the state, plus a virtual health center. The Marquette Health Center was the only PPMI clinic in the Upper Peninsula.
PPMI leaders said they’re hoping to help offset the closures by ramping up telehealth access, to eventually be able to offer 40% more virtual appointments than they currently do, including new weekend and evening hours.
“With the expansion of telehealth, I think we’ll actually be able to see more patients,” said Thornton Greear.
Many of the services Planned Parenthood of Michigan provides, including gender-affirming care, can already be accessed via the virtual health center, Wallett said.
“I can't put in an implant [for certain types of birth control] in your arm if we're not together, but we are going to make sure that patients know where they could go for that, or if they need support getting to one of our locations, help them get there,” she said.
PPMI’s virtual health center is “our most popular health center,” she said. “In telehealth, I can have an appointment in my car during lunch. I don't have to take extra time off. I don't have to drive there. I don’t have to find childcare.”
In the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned in 2022, PPMI said it saw the number of out-of-state abortion patients triple, with about 2,000 out-of-state abortion patients a year coming to PPMI clinics. Currently, about 10-12% of abortion patients are coming from other states, a spokesperson said via email Wednesday.
But president and CEO Paula Thornton Greear pledged that neither Michigan nor out-of-state patients would experience longer wait times for care, despite closure of three clinics and the staff cuts.
“We see and we hear every day about the impact on people who are not able to get procedural abortion care in their states where they live,” Thornton Greear said. “We have a stated commitment that helps to drive decisions like this, so that people can maintain access and we can increase access. We are doing everything that we do in order to ensure that people will not have to wait to get the essential care that they need.”
Why are the cuts happening now?
Executives said they expect an already-challenging financial picture to darken under the current Trump administration.
That includes cuts to Planned Parenthood’s Title X funding. In 2019, the previous Trump administration instituted a so-called “gag rule,” barring Title X providers from including abortion services in their referrals to patients, and “required physical separation of family planning and abortion services, effectively disqualifying all family planning clinics, including Planned Parenthood, that also provided or referred their patients for abortions,” according to a KFF analysis.
But that time, the funding cut only lasted two years, until the Biden administration rescinded the Trump-era regulations in 2021. Now, PPMI executives believe the funding freeze announced on Monday will remain in place for the foreseeable future.
And PPMI did not see a “Trump bump” in fundraising after the 2024 election, Thornton Greear said, referring to the increase in donations some progressive organizations saw in 2016.
“This is a different time,” she said. “It doesn't mean that [donors] are not supportive, that they do not care, that they're not here for us. But we understand that they have important decisions to make about where they put their dollars.”
Even before the current Trump administration, PPMI had experienced some financial headwinds. In its most recent publicly available tax filing, PPMI reported a loss of some $2.4 million in the 2022-2023 fiscal year, with $27.5 million in net assets. That year, the organization reported spending about $15.7 million in medical services, with a revenue of about $11 million from medical services (total revenues for the year were about $26.3 million, including contributions, grants, investment income and other sources.)
The Michigan cuts are also part of a larger trend: Planned Parenthood of Illinois recently announced the closure of four clinics, including one in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago, citing financial shortfalls and an “uncertain patient care landscape,” according to WTTW and the Chicago Tribune.
In August last year, Planned Parenthood of Greater New York closed four clinics and stopped offering abortions past 20 weeks at its Manhattan site, saying it could no longer support the costs of “deep sedation” required, according to the New York Times. The New York organization is also looking to sell its Manhattan clinic’s building, according to Gothamist.
The New York chapter also instituted executive pay cuts, which Thornton Greear said PPMI is not currently considering, though “everything is always on the table.”
And in February, the New York Times published an investigation alleging patient care problems and staffing issues at numerous state Planned Parenthood affiliates. Those issues, some staff members told the Times, stem from financial and political pressures, as well as a funding structure in which the national Planned Parenthood federation focuses the majority of its spending on the legal fight over abortion access, more than providing direct support for the medical care provided by state affiliates.
Thornton Greear said the complaints about the quality of patient care in the Times were “very isolated incidents. And I think when you look at the totality of what Planned Parenthood does, and the patient satisfaction reviews that we do, I think it would counter that article.”
PPMI and the national Planned Parenthood federation “have a really strong partnership, and we’re really proud of the work that we do with them,” she said. “The pot just in general is not big enough.”
Asked if the national funding model structure needs to change, she said: “I think that it needs to be looked at, and what they're able to do. And I know that that is actively happening.”
A changing national landscape for abortion care
It’s not just Planned Parenthood clinics that have had to close recently, even in states where voters have enacted legal protections for abortion. A 2024 report from the Abortion Care Network (which represents independent abortion providers) mapped 76 independent clinics that have closed since Roe was overturned. While the vast majority were in states that banned abortion, several were in states where abortion has remained legal, including nine in California.
The landscape for abortion providers after the Supreme Court's ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization — the case that overturned Roe v. Wade — has been a complicated one for all providers, said Caitlin Myers, a professor of economics at Middlebury College who studies abortion access and tracks clinic openings and closures.
“They’ve been thrown into a bit of turmoil,” she said. Many “were seeing lots of people traveling to them out of banned states,” and “at the exact same time, the rise of telehealth abortion, which has certainly expanded access, is forcing all of these facilities to confront a very changed landscape of providing services… Put more simply, it's got to change their business model.”
Post-Dobbs, new virtual providers started offering medication abortion access entirely online, Myers said. “In many cases, you can have a text consultation, and you can also have a video conference consultation, with a provider who's licensed in the state where you live. And then they're sending abortion medications directly to your home address.”
Those market changes, on top of the federal funding cuts and regulatory uncertainties are creating “new pressures on the older school, brick-and-mortar facilities,” she said, who still maintain services for people “for whom telehealth abortion isn't a good option. Either they're not good candidates for it, or they're not comfortable with it, or whatever the reason might be. And so it's necessitated a lot of change for these facilities.”
What worries Myers is that “this type of risk and uncertainty, this isn't really something that providers of reproductive health care services to higher-income populations face.”
People with private health insurance often have more options for local providers, or can afford to travel longer distances for care that can only be provided in-person. But healthcare providers who serve patient populations that receive Medicaid (or pay out-of-pocket) can’t just raise prices. “Well, you can, but the consumer isn't going to be able to afford it,” she said. “And they're not going to show up.”
“This combination of disruption in the market, and this enormous uncertainty about what future financial models are available, the combination of those two things is likely to just create impossible choices,” she said. “And it's really likely to reduce reproductive health care access for lower-income populations.”
PPMI president and CEO Paula Thornton Greear said the organization knows there are patients in the US who “wonder when, where, or how to get the essential healthcare they need. We're doing everything we can to make sure that Michiganders, and those who have to come to Michigan for care, don't have to wake up and answer that question.
“But elections matter,” she said. “We didn't have to be in this position. Fundamental rights and freedoms are being stripped away. We are going backwards in time. And this is not something that can be course-corrected in a short amount of time. This is going to really have [a] generational impact on health equity in this state, and in this country.”
