Missouri could become the first US state in the modern era without an abortion clinic, officials with the last remaining facility, in St Louis, said on Tuesday.

Health officials in Missouri have refused to renew the clinic’s license, demanding that all seven physicians and trainees practicing there be made available for what officials of the women’s reproductive healthcare provider Planned Parenthood described as an “interrogation”.

“This is not a drill. This is not a warning. This is a real public health crisis,” said Dr Lena Wen, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “This week, Missouri would be the first state in the country to go dark – without a health center that provides safe, legal abortion care.”

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Planned Parenthood officials told reporters early on Tuesday afternoon that health investigators said the interviews could lead to board review or criminal proceedings, and declined to give any topic or bounds for the interviews or describe their investigation.

Wen said the demand for interviews was not “something we have ever seen before” and called such interviews “inappropriate and suspicious interrogation”. She added: “This has nothing to do with medicine.”

There are fears the clinic could be shut down by the end of the week.

Last week, Missouri joined a handful of other Republican-led states as it passed a near-total abortion ban. Missouri’s law bans abortion eight weeks into a pregnancy, before most women know they are pregnant, and allows prosecutors to charge abortion providers criminally and seek up to 15 years in prison. There are no exemptions for victims of rape and incest to obtain an abortion.

Abortion is legal in all 50 US states, but through a series of incremental regulations on clinics, mandating everything from the size of hallways to pelvic exams, states have gradually forced clinics to close.

Abortion bans passed this year are unlikely to go into effect. They are instead designed to be unconstitutional and be challenged in court, which anti-abortion campaigners hope will force the US supreme court to reconsider the landmark 1973 decision Roe v Wade. The decision found women have a constitutional right to obtain an abortion and was the trigger for abortion to become legal across the US.

“This is the world that the Trump administration and Republican public officials across the country have been pushing for – a world where abortion care is illegal and inaccessible in this country,” said Wen.

There were 926,000 abortions performed in the US in 2014, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Abortion is far safer than many outpatient procedures, such as colonoscopies, for example. About one in four women will have an abortion in their lifetimes. The majority of women who obtain an abortion are already mothers.

Planned Parenthood sued Missouri in federal and state court on Tuesday, hoping to forestall an end to abortion services in the state on Friday. If the clinic is unsuccessful, Planned Parenthood in St Louis will have to stop performing abortions and send patients to neighboring Illinois or other states, officials said.

There are 1.1 million women of reproductive age living in Missouri.

The Missouri department of health and senior services did not immediately respond to a request for comment.