When she and her staff returned to work, she held off on filling the vacant slots from canceled abortion appointments. It was the only way she could escape and cope. Over the weekend, she shut off her phone, lay under a weighted blanket on her couch, ate junk food and watched television. She’ll forever remember that Friday as one of the worst days of her life. Quiñonez encouraged all to take breaks, often managing the phones herself.
Workers who had the day off showed up, some still in pajamas, to relieve colleagues and offer support. She watched her staff break down and sob. “You think you think you’re prepared for the moment, but you’re never really prepared until it’s a reality,” executive director Katie Quiñonez said. The entire staff found themselves in crisis mode for days, though they and others across the country expected the ruling for months. On the other end of the line, she’d never before heard people speak with such fear. Immediately after the decision’s release, Maness was one of a few staff members tasked with calling patients to cancel abortion appointments. The resolve to continue that work has buoyed employees. Several days of the week are dedicated to routine gynecological care - cervical exams, cancer screenings - mostly for low-income patients on Medicaid with nowhere else to go. Like many clinics that perform abortions, the facility did not offer the procedure daily. “I don’t think any of us can block it out,” she said. The conversations with frantic patients that first day play on an inescapable loop in her head. At the West Virginia center, the days following the historic court ruling brought on a different kind of grief for staff as their new reality set in, one Maness said will linger long after the initial trauma of the decision.
Nationwide, workers at clinics that shuttered abortion services are feeling fear and stress as they try to pick up the pieces and chart a path forward. Other states are in various stages of legal limbo. The ACLU of West Virginia filed a lawsuit on behalf of the clinic, asking that the law be declared unenforceable so staff can immediately resume abortions. Wade days earlier and ruled that states can ban abortion, the clinic was forced to suspend the procedures because of an 1800s-era state law banning them.
The waiting room should have been filling up with patients on two days last week, when the clinic reserves all slots for abortion appointments. “It’s the kind of heartbreak that’s difficult to put into words. “It literally just sickens me, and we don’t know what their futures hold for them,” Maness said of the residents who rely on the Women’s Health Center of West Virginia.
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