“Rough Draft.” That was the title of the Substack post in which former antiabortion activist and content creator Charlotte Isenberg, then 20 years old, announced she had a “capital-A Abortion”—with the hope of processing an intense experience and making peace with it publicly.
Just five years prior, at the age of 15, Isenberg says she became pregnant from rape following several years of alleged sexual abuse. After 10 weeks of pregnancy, Isenberg miscarried. She took to social media to share her experience and complicated emotions. “I was still trying to process all these things that were way too much for me,” Isenberg told Ms. in a recent interview. “I started using my social media like a diary, like a lot of teenage girls do.”
This series of online posts following her miscarriage and alleged sexual abuse was what first brought her to the attention of antiabortion groups. A number of them reached out to her directly. According to Isenberg, some—including the well-funded powerhouse Live Action—didn’t reach out at all … but instead posted about the teenage Isenberg without her consent, choosing to position her story as an antiabortion cautionary tale, and Isenberg as a model.
“People were relating my really traumatic miscarriage to antiabortion narratives,” Isenberg said.
Still, feeling isolated from peers due to both her traumatic experiences and the COVID-19 pandemic, Isenberg found a sense of belonging in these online spaces.
“Almost immediately, anti-abortion actors threaded a narrative for me between my grief, my miscarriage and anti-abortion sentiment. I clung to it with desperation,” Isenberg wrote on her Substack, She Can’t Say That, in 2024. “I was frequently tagged by thought leaders on social media when they were rightfully questioned about abortion in cases of rape, so that I could make their argument for them with my trauma.”
For the next several years, Isenberg was associated with these antiabortion activists and groups.
The way Isenberg sees this period of her life now, though, is that they exploited her young age and marketed her story before millions of people on social media and in podcasts and debates. “I once heard myself referred to as a weapon, and I was used like one,” she wrote.
Still, as a self-described lonely teen, Isenberg found a sense of belonging in the so-called Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising (PAAU), a nonprofit organization founded in 2021. On its website and social media pages, PAAU co-opts the language of social and reproductive justice movements, describing its mission as promoting feminist values and non-violence. As opposed to many established antiabortion groups, which openly promote Christian nationalist and homophobic ideology, PAAU claims to support inclusivity and members of all races, religions and sexual orientations, a position that seems intended to lure in young or vulnerable people like Isenberg who identify with progressive values.
In reality, the leaders of PAAU have histories of harassing abortion clinics, patients and staff. Founder Terrisa Bukovinac has been arrested multiple times and was sentenced to prison for clinic trespassing in 2022. Lauren Handy, another leader in PAAU, was sentenced to five years in prison after invading and blockading a Washington, D.C., abortion clinic in 2020. In January, Handy was one of 23 antiabortion extremists pardoned by President Trump and released from prison, despite convictions of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act.
Through her involvement with PAAU and other groups, Isenberg quickly became a rising figure in the youth antiabortion spaces, She spent her high school years posting on social media about her experiences and the so-called dangers of abortion; protesting outside of clinics and the Supreme Court; and even invading a Northern California pharmacy that agreed to carry mifepristone (one of the two pills commonly used in medication abortion) and harassing patients and prescribers.
“I think, looking back now, I was looking for a sense of community and also structure and a belief system,” Isenberg told Ms.
Doubts Start to Form
Isenberg, who is Jewish, admitted that she frequently felt out of place in the antiabortion movement’s overwhelmingly right-wing, evangelical Christian leaning. She told Ms. that at some protests, including the Sacramento March for Life, she felt uncomfortable watching fellow antiabortion activists having friendly interactions with neo-Nazis also in attendance (who Isenberg says made “white power” signs at her when they saw her Star of David necklace). Later, when she tried to give a presentation to PAAU on recognizing white supremacists in antiabortion spaces, she says group leaders shut her down.
At the same time, Isenberg said, she became increasingly uncomfortable with the violent rhetoric antiabortion activists used to talk about women who had had abortions, as well as the misinformation the group and others like it spread about birth control options such as Plan B. “Do I really want to be associated with people who are calling these people murderers because they had abortions, some of them … when they were my age?” she remembers thinking.
An Antiabortion Activist Needs an Abortion
In May 2024, at age 20, Isenberg says her birth control failed, and she became pregnant for the second time. The timing was devastating: She was unemployed, without stable housing or transportation, and preparing to relocate for college—the first in her family to access higher education.
At first, she considered carrying the pregnancy to term; Isenberg says she sought financial support from a prominent antiabortion activist she had worked with previously (name intentionally withheld), hoping the organization that had once been her home would help her raise a child. But Isenberg says that support did not materialize—reflecting her growing suspicions that, despite claiming to support new moms, antiabortion groups don’t always follow through with resources after successfully convincing people not to go through with an abortion. (Crisis pregnancy centers or fake clinics also frequently lure pregnant women with services like free diapers, but often don’t continue providing support, despite increases in government funding.)
Recalling fundraisers and baby registries she had helped organize in the past, “I definitely heard them talk about it,” Isenberg said. But “aside from mutual aid fairs they go to, like, once a year, I’ve never seen them actually provide that kind of immediate financial support to anyone.”
When she couldn’t find adequate support for her unplanned pregnancy, Isenberg scheduled an appointment at her local Planned Parenthood for an abortion consultation, unsure of what she would ultimately decide. (At the time, Isenberg’s state of residence, North Carolina, allowed abortion up to 12 weeks.)
When another prominent antiabortion activist, also a PAAU member at the time and one of Isenberg’s best friends in the movement, found out about her appointment, she and other members of the group intervened aggressively. Isenberg recalls being pressured by several PAAU members to visit a crisis pregnancy center instead of keeping her Planned Parenthood appointment. The morning of her abortion consultation, she says she received dozens of threatening phone calls from other PAAU members—people she had considered friends and allies.
When the efforts to harass her failed, she said someone called 911 to falsely report Isenberg as suicidal to prevent her from making her appointment. Someone also reportedly contacted a magistrate to attempt to issue an involuntary psychiatric commitment for 72 hours.
Despite this pressure, she decided to keep her appointment. In the end, Isenberg was able to make the decision that was best for her and her body, despite her network’s attempts to intervene.
Still, the harassment from her former friends left lasting trauma. “These events of this summer are burned into my memory,” Isenberg wrote last fall. “I now struggle with going to the doctor and interacting with police officers … I’ve received endless harassment and death threats after the news of my abortion broke in far-right spaces. Many anti-abortion leaders encouraged this sentiment, telling their thousands of followers that I should be facing the death penalty.”
From Antiabortion Survivor to Abortion-Rights Activist
Isenberg has turned her experiences into advocacy. Since her own abortion, she’s become a reproductive freedom activist, educating others about extremist antiabortion tactics and promoting systemic protections for people navigating reproductive healthcare.
Isenberg told us that she regularly gets social media DMs from people like her who have left the antiabortion movement but are afraid to speak about it publicly. High exit costs—such as the threats Isenberg faced when she left—are a classic hallmark of cults, and she has described her experience in antiabortion groups as cult-like.
Last year, Isenberg interned for the Harris-Walz campaign and has since done pro-abortion advocacy work with reproductive justice nonprofit Collective Rising, where she used her personal experience to write a report describing the history and inner workings of the antiabortion extremist movement. Now, the North Carolina native has pivoted to reproductive rights advocacy work to help others like her, starting an abortion doula collective at her university, Appalachian State.
She hopes that sharing her experience as a former antiabortion poster child, then being alienated and attacked by the same movement, will show people the dark realities of the antiabortion movement. “At a certain point, you come face to face with something, and you can’t really look away from it,” she told Ms. By confronting her history and the movement she once championed, she has turned her story into advocacy—educating others, challenging misinformation, and fighting for reproductive freedom so that others don’t have to face the same threats alone.
