Washington — The Supreme Court on Tuesday turned down a challenge to a restrictive Arkansas law that for now will end the use of medication abortions in the state and could close two of the state’s three abortion clinics. The law requires doctors who provide medication abortions to have a contract with a second doctor who has hospital admitting privileges. Arkansas contends there can be complications with the procedure, while abortion rights advocates say the law’s objective is to make it more difficult for women to access the two-pill regimen that is used in the first nine weeks of pregnancy.

While Planned Parenthood said it immediately would notify patients that it can no longer offer the procedure in the state, the case is expected to return to a lower court, perhaps for a trial on the law’s benefits and burdens. “Arkansas is now shamefully responsible for being the first state to ban medication abortion,” Dawn Laguens, executive vice president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America said in a statement.

“This dangerous law also immediately ends access to safe, legal abortion at all but one health center in the state,” Laguens said. “If that’s not an undue burden, what is? This law cannot and must not stand. We will not stop fighting for every person’s right to access safe, legal abortion.”

A medication abortion involves a woman taking mifepristone, which makes it difficult for a fetus to attach in the uterus, and misoprostol, which causes expulsion, similar to a miscarriage. In 2014, medication abortions accounted for 45 percent of abortions nationally in the first nine weeks, abortion providers said in a brief to the court. Arkansas said 14 percent of the state’s abortion patients used the procedure.

The state has three abortion clinics, and two of those offer only medication abortions. So the law could leave one clinic, in Little Rock, to serve the entire state — and it would offer only surgical abortions.

Planned Parenthood said it would ask a lower court again to halt the law until a judge can hold a trial to show how many women could be affected by it. If a clinic in Fayetteville, which offers only medication abortion, is closed, the organization said, women in that area would be forced to make a 380-mile round trip to Little Rock to obtain an abortion. And they could be forced to make the trip twice because of a separate 48-hour waiting period.