Content warning: This story contains details about sexual assault and graphic descriptions of miscarriage.
On the morning of June 26, 2024, Charlotte Isenberg woke up worried.
The 20-year-old was pregnant and had an appointment for an ultrasound at a Planned Parenthood in Charlotte, North Carolina. She didn’t dread the scan itself, a state requirement 72 hours before having a medication abortion. Instead, she was afraid of who might be waiting for her at the clinic.
After a 30-mile drive, Isenberg and her boyfriend pulled through the gate that protected the Planned Parenthood from prying eyes. It was as they backed into a parking space that Isenberg spotted her: a woman who’d traveled 400 miles from Washington, D.C. A once-friend whom Isenberg had not told the exact details of her appointment.
“Don’t go through with it. You are so deeply loved....”
“Your circumstance isn’t permanent and you’re STRONG AS HELL....”
“You will be provided for and supported in any way you need....”
“You will be a great mom to your baby!...”
“I will adopt this baby. Please, sweetheart, please....”
The texts and voicemails had been relentless. Prominent anti-abortion activists blowing up her phone, begging Isenberg to change her mind. Isenberg assumed they’d been tipped off by Kristin Turner, 22, the woman now standing outside the Planned Parenthood.
Isenberg considered going home. But if she did, there was a good chance she wouldn’t get another appointment in time. After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, abortions in North Carolina are legal through 12 weeks of pregnancy with few exceptions afterward, and a medication abortion requires three in-person appointments. Isenberg got out of the car and walked into the clinic, avoiding Turner.
“Just come give me a hug, man I miss you,” Turner texted.
“Charolette [sic], I am going to come in there if you don’t come out though.”
“I can’t stand by and let you get hurt. We have a sonographer waiting at the pregnancy center if you want to get an ultrasound and hear your options. Just come say hi, we spent all day yesterday driving here and my heart is breaking for you. I just want to see you.”
Minutes later, Turner appeared inside the clinic. She sat down near Isenberg and kept her pleas on repeat: “You don’t have to go through with this. I’m here for you.”
Isenberg tried to keep ignoring her, but she could feel herself losing control of the situation. When her ultrasound was over, Turner was still in the waiting room. Isenberg and her boyfriend rushed outside without stopping to book a second appointment.
Isenberg was distraught but not surprised. After all, she’d once sat where Turner did. She’d joined Turner at anti-abortion rallies, shouted into a bullhorn with Turner to protest the sale of abortion pills. She’d “invaded” clinics to “rescue” babies “scheduled to be killed.” She knew this playbook—or, at least, she thought she did. Never could Isenberg have guessed how far her former allies would take things this time—that before this was all over, she’d go through a hell of EMTs, police, the ER, a magistrate warrant, and an involuntary psychiatric evaluation.
This morning’s intervention was just the beginning.
Isenberg’s journey into anti-abortion activism began in a high school bathroom. It was November 2018 and she was a 15-year-old freshman in the middle of a practice math exam when she felt something strange in her stomach. Once in the school’s bleak basement bathroom, she found blood and clumps of what looked like tissue in the toilet. Terrified, she began googling for answers.
She sat in that bathroom stall for 45 minutes, ultimately realizing she was having a miscarriage. Isenberg had vaguely suspected she might be pregnant. She had been raped by an adult she knew but had told no one. She pulled up her skirt and walked back to class. It wasn’t until months later that she confided in her English teacher, which triggered a mandatory reporting process to the police. Isenberg was both scared and relieved, although her family and friends seemed unwilling to talk about her abuse.
Alienated, vulnerable, and lonely, she started using Twitter as a diary, posting about her experience and grief. “I was like, Holy shit,” Isenberg says now, “I have to express this in some way.” It wasn’t long before anti-abortion activists started replying. To them, Isenberg was a young, godly mother who got pregnant from rape but “chose life.” To Isenberg, their recognition gave her a sense of purpose and belonging.
Truthfully, before all this, Isenberg had never given the idea of abortion much thought, though a Baptist church she’d been going to with a friend had been fundraising for a local crisis pregnancy center. The messaging it used, that “women in poverty should not feel like they have to have abortions,” sounded a lot like justice to Isenberg. Nobody should be forced to do anything related to reproductive health, she remembers thinking. (While crisis pregnancy centers, or CPCs, may seem like legitimate health care organizations, in reality, they are run by anti-abortion activists and do not offer a full range of health care, services, or accurate information.)
At first, Isenberg’s activism mostly took place online. As @ProLifeJewess on TikTok and Twitter, she showed her tens of thousands of followers that anti-abortion activists weren’t all old white Christian men. Videos she was in on YouTube got millions of views. In 2021, she joined a new organization called Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, or PAAU. Its members identified as secular, leftist, and pro-life, all of which resonated with Isenberg, who cared about feminism and racial justice and believed in government support for low-income mothers and expanded maternity leave.
PAAU’s director of community organizing was a young woman named Kristin Turner. Both Turner and Isenberg had experienced abuse as teenagers. They shared a similar sense of humor and bonded over roller-skating and the band Car Seat Headrest. At marches, meetings, and protests, their friendship grew.
With Turner, Isenberg protested the sale of abortion medications like mifepristone and misoprostol at Walgreens and CVS. Social media posts show the two women marching through a store in boot-cut jeans and crop tops, carrying a sign that read, “Walgreens trades pulses for profits.” In a video posted on Twitter, Isenberg shouts into a megaphone as other protesters watch: “Let Walgreens know that we don’t want murder where we get our medicine.”
In 2022, PAAU launched a campaign to bring back the “clinic rescue,” a practice from the ’80s that can involve protesters physically blocking abortion clinic entrances or entering them while pretending to be patients. Except this time, activists like Turner and Isenberg could use social media as witness.
That March, Lauren Handy, PAAU’s director of activism, was indicted for blocking the entrance to a clinic in a rescue. Handy told police that she’d also taken the remains of five fetuses from a medical waste services truck outside a clinic in Washington, D.C., to “give them a proper burial and a funeral.” She was ultimately sentenced to five years in prison for violating a federal law that prohibits intimidation, obstruction, or destruction in abortion clinics. (President Trump later pardoned Handy and 22 other people charged with similar violations.)
This was the corner of the anti-abortion movement that Isenberg had become enmeshed in, where extreme measures were often encouraged and where reluctance to participate in them was treated as a lack of commitment at best, as complicity in genocide at worst. Randall Terry, the anti-abortion activist who created the original blueprint for clinic rescues and appeared alongside PAAU’s Handy at a 2022 press conference about the fetuses, once said, “Let all those in government be warned: They cannot order people to pay for the murder of babies, and betray God Himself, without horrific consequences.” (Terry was also one of the activists who contacted Isenberg as she was on the way to her Planned Parenthood appointment.)
In the spring of 2023, when Isenberg was preparing to graduate from high school, it was time for her and Turner to do a clinic rescue. They took an Uber to an independent clinic in Charlotte called A Preferred Women’s Health Center. They told the clinic’s volunteers that they had an appointment and walked inside. Hidden in their bags were pink roses tied to notes reading “PREGNANT? NEED HELP?” above the phone number for a nearby crisis pregnancy center.
The waiting room was clean and quiet, hardly the murderous palace Isenberg had been expecting. While the women hadn’t blocked anyone from entering—this wasn’t that type of “rescue”—they hoped to persuade patients not to end their pregnancies. As Turner handed out the flowers, Isenberg, suddenly overwhelmed and confused, sat in a waiting room chair and began to cry. Later, the two posed for social media photos outside the clinic’s fence, Turner clutching a pink rose and raising her hand triumphantly.
Isenberg wrote on Twitter, “We are the clinic invaders and yours is next.” Inside, though, she felt very different. “I was mortified,” Isenberg remembers, “like, deep in my soul, because I knew how stupid what I was doing was.”
Yelling at people as they sought health care or picked up a prescription felt hypocritical—as did talking a big game about helping people while violating their privacy. That night at a Denny’s, the women argued. Isenberg criticized Turner’s more inflammatory tactics. Turner accused Isenberg of being weak and uncommitted to their cause. (Cosmopolitan reached out to Kristin Turner for an interview and later with a list of questions. She did not respond.) Turner was right, thought Isenberg—her own anti-abortion ideology had begun to unravel.
Five days before her June 2024 ultrasound, despite not having been in touch in over six months, Isenberg contacted Turner. Since they’d last spoken, Isenberg had been through it. She’d broken up with her conservative Catholic boyfriend and applied to college. She’d walked away from PAAU. Searching once again for identity and purpose, she had struggled with anxiety and began to drink heavily.
Her new boyfriend encouraged Isenberg to enroll in an inpatient addiction treatment program. There, she came to understand that sharing her story over and over for the anti-abortion movement, having her entire existence reduced to one sentence—“When I was 15, I got pregnant from rape”—had been yet another form of exploitation. “It made me feel ashamed, because I had once been so proud of it,” Isenberg says now.
By the spring of 2024, a newly sober Isenberg felt like she could finally stop performing all the time and just be herself, a complex human being who was still learning. She planned to spend the summer living with her parents while saving up money. In the fall, she would become the first person in her family to attend a four-year college. Then she got pregnant.
The news brought a “sense of dread,” says Isenberg. Her first thought was strong and immediate: I’m not going to have a baby. After a friend had described having an abortion, Isenberg’s own mindset had started to shift. She’d begun to think of herself as pro-choice. It wouldn’t be the end of the world, she thought, if I had an abortion. This is something I’m allowed to do.
It may seem strange that Isenberg would reach out to Turner in this moment. But she was feeling stressed, sick, and confused and wanted to have a backup plan just in case she didn’t go through with the abortion. She knew Turner—who’d also recently left PAAU but whose politics were growing more, not less, conservative—would try to talk her out of it, but she’d also recently seen Turner using her social media platforms to raise money for pregnant women and mothers in need. Isenberg had less than $100 in her bank account. If she changed her mind, she would be in dire need of financial help.
“I was also thinking, This is Kristin Turner, the girl I was friends with,” remembers Isenberg. “I wasn’t thinking, She is acting as a vessel for people who are much more powerful than her.”
Turner put Isenberg in touch with an organization that gave money to women with “crisis pregnancies.” She also asked for Isenberg’s address so she could send her a care package and promised a McDonald’s breakfast if Isenberg agreed to get her ultrasound at a crisis pregnancy center instead of the Charlotte Planned Parenthood (Isenberg declined the latter).
Isenberg expected Turner and members of PAAU to offer her “counseling” and a lecture on the psychological impacts of abortion and how carrying out a pregnancy is a “nonviolent choice.” She assumed they’d ask their Instagram followers to “say a prayer for my friend who’s chosen the heartbreak of abortion,” as she’d once posted for others. But she believed that in the end, they’d respect her right to choose her own care. She thought that after she’d ignored Turner at her Planned Parenthood ultrasound, Turner would leave her alone.
Her boyfriend, who’d been supportive since Isenberg had told him she was pregnant, drove them back to his house that day. Isenberg changed into comfortable clothes, hoping to take a nap or watch TV. A few hours later, at around 4 p.m., Turner texted again. She was at a nearby hotel with a young woman named Lydia Gibson.
“Did you wanna hang out for a bit?” Turner asked. “We don’t have to talk about anything.”
Even though Isenberg had doubts, even though she barely knew Gibson, she clung to the fact that Turner had been her friend for years. Shouldn’t they be able to offer each other support, regardless of their now-differing opinions on abortion? Isenberg replied with her boyfriend’s address and agreed to be picked up.
Over coffee, the women chatted for more than an hour before Turner mentioned that Isenberg’s boyfriend seemed like a nice guy. Didn’t she want to marry him and have his baby? Maybe in the future, responded Isenberg, but not yet, not now. And just like that, Turner’s tone changed. She started questioning whether Isenberg’s boyfriend was abusing Isenberg and wondering if he was forcing her to have an abortion.
Isenberg was done. She asked for an immediate ride back to her boyfriend’s house. Turner refused, saying that Isenberg was in an “unsafe situation” and they didn’t feel comfortable taking her there. “She was putting increasing pressure on me,” recalls Isenberg. “And it’s like the frog in the boiling pot, you know? It gets to the point where you realize you’ve been cooking the whole fucking time, and it’s like, ‘I need to get out of this situation.’”
Isenberg began the long walk back. She only made it a few blocks before an Emergency Medical Services vehicle stopped her.
The driver said they’d received a call from someone who was concerned her friend was going to hurt herself. They were looking for a petite white girl wearing a brown t-shirt, which Isenberg was, walking by herself down the street. She found herself explaining the spiraling situation—that she was thinking of having an abortion and her former friends were upset about it. The EMTs believed her and called a police officer to drive Isenberg home.
While her boyfriend cooked dinner, Isenberg went outside to make a phone call. As she paced across the lawn in her bare feet, wearing boxers, a t-shirt and no bra, blinding headlights approached. For a second, she thought it was Turner and Gibson again, but it was a different cop who stepped out of that car. “We have a warrant saying you are a danger to yourself and others,” Isenberg remembers the officer saying. “We’ve got to take you into custody, and they’re wanting to hold you for 72 hours in the psych ward at the hospital.” They were going to have her involuntarily committed.
Isenberg and her boyfriend tried to explain and, in shock, she took a few steps back. “Don’t turn away from me, girl, because I’ll cuff you,” she says the officer warned. I have to stop moving and stop crying or else I’m not going to make it out of this in one piece, thought Isenberg. As she was put into the back of a squad car, she asked her boyfriend to bring her a pair of shoes.
At the hospital, Isenberg tried to pull herself together. Her fate seemed to hinge on her credibility, but it was hard to look credible when two huge cops were marching her through the ER. In a triage room, nurses checked Isenberg’s vitals and gave her a gown. She repeated her story to every person she met, hoping someone would recognize she wasn’t supposed to be there.
Isenberg would later learn that Lydia Gibson, in a sworn affidavit to the Gaston County magistrate, said that Isenberg “was struggling” and had taken “a bunch of pills trying to kill herself.” Gibson went further, asserting that Isenberg had “been raped before” and was “in the worst mental place of her life.” Gibson said that Isenberg’s “personality” was “not aligned with her values.” Gibson said she had driven to North Carolina “out of concern for the patient regarding her health care decisions.” (In a Reddit post from early 2025, Gibson claimed that she went to the magistrate because Isenberg had recently been to rehab and expressed “suicidal ideations” during their conversation. “I do not regret trying to intervene, to save her and her baby, and to get her the help she needed,” wrote Gibson. Cosmopolitan reached out to Gibson, who declined to comment. Isenberg says she has never experienced suicidal thoughts and certainly never expressed any to Gibson that day.)
By the time the psychiatric nurse arrived at Isenberg’s bedside, it was close to midnight. Isenberg was exhausted. She repeated her story one more time. “I’m going to be real with you, I do not see anything mentally wrong with you,” Isenberg says the nurse told her. “It’s easy to listen to your story. I’m not going to commit you.” She amended Isenberg’s medical file to say that Isenberg was “not a danger to herself or anyone else.” A doctor signed a sworn statement saying Isenberg should be released.
This time, the drive back to Isenberg’s boyfriend’s house was silent. She crawled into bed and stayed there for the entirety of the next day. When she got up, she still had a problem to solve—she remained pregnant.
In the post-Roe era, many women “self-manage” their medication abortions by ordering mifepristone and misoprostol online without a doctor’s assistance. Mifepristone causes the uterine lining to break down and misoprostol makes the uterus contract. The legality of ordering the pills and taking them without a prescription varies state by state. Isenberg knew they were a largely safe and effective option, but she’d wanted the clinical care and professional support that Planned Parenthood provided. Now, though, she couldn’t imagine going back to a clinic.
She paid less than $100 for the pills and waited for the package to arrive. On July 7 at around 1:30 a.m. at her parents’ house, she took the medication, choosing to tell no one, not even her boyfriend. She wasn’t sure of the legalities in her state and didn’t want him to get in trouble. (While North Carolina does not have a law prohibiting self-managed abortion, after what Isenberg had been through, she was concerned that wouldn’t matter.)
It was a long night. Isenberg’s mind spiraled through the countless stories she’d once heard about the supposed dangers of medication abortions. She called her boyfriend’s phone just to hear his voice on his outgoing message. Around dawn, she finally fell asleep. When she woke up, aside from some stomach pain and bleeding, she felt physically fine.
Yet once again, Isenberg felt like she was carrying around an awful secret. “I was like, You can’t tell anybody that you had this abortion,” she remembers thinking. “You’re gonna have to take this to your grave.”
In the fall, Isenberg started college. One day, a prominent anti-abortion activist came to her school on an “Abortion Is Violence” campus tour. On the university’s mall, Isenberg chose to offer her own perspective, speaking publicly about abortion as she’d done so many times before. This time, though, she didn’t describe the visiting activists as “pro-life.” She called them “anti-choice.”
Later, she posted a photo of the event on Instagram. The light is golden as Isenberg stands on a platform, long straight hair tucked behind one ear, microphone in hand. In the caption, she wrote: “I am so, so, so thankful for the beautiful community I’ve been welcomed into. I would not have been able to give this speech without the support of our college dems and all of my new friends. I love you guys.”
To date, the most Liked comment on the post is: “You murdered your child? Wicked. I pray that you repent before the Lord Jesus comes back.”
If you have a legal question about abortion, pregnancy loss, or birth, consider reaching out to the Repro Legal Helpline at 844-868-2812 or contacting them through this online form. If you are struggling with your mental health and want help finding resources, you can call 800-950-NAMI or text “HelpLine” to 62640 to speak with a trained staffer or volunteer at the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
