On Abortion Rights

A speech given on October 29, 2024

I am here to share some deeply personal things with you all which may be hard to hear, but I believe they are absolutely necessary to talk about. Thanks to politicians like Donald Trump and JD Vance, as well as lobbying groups like The Heritage Foundation and Students for Life, even the most deeply personal aspects of our lives have been made political. 

My name is Charlotte Isenberg, and I had an abortion. 

I now count myself among the 1 in 4 women in the United States who will need this form of healthcare in their lifetime. If you were to go back and tell teenage-me that she would eventually give this speech, I would have laughed in your face.

Just like every other woman who finds herself needing abortion care, I have a story that led me here, though mine is slightly unusual. I used to be an anti-abortion activist.

I was raped for the first time when I was eleven. I suffered constant sexual abuse for years until I was a freshman in high school, when I finally told my teacher what was happening to me. A few months before I reported my abuse, I experienced a deeply traumatic pregnancy and miscarriage as a result of that rape. I was about ten weeks pregnant when I started bleeding heavily during a math exam. I went to the empty bathroom in our school basement, where I miscarried. I was fifteen years old.

Any grown woman would be devastated by that kind of experience, let alone a little girl. Feeling isolated from my peers by both my trauma and the pandemic, I began trying to process what happened to me by talking about it on social media. 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. 

For the next five years, I was a rising star in anti-abortion spaces. I found a target for all the anger and pain inside me. I spoke about my rapist threatening to force me to have an abortion if I became pregnant. I laid bare my grief over the loss of my pregnancy-the only aspect of my life and body I felt any control over. In return, anti-abortion leaders put a camera in my face and a microphone in my hand. Beginning just months after my abuse ended, I became the literal poster child for women and girls who conceive from rape. I was platformed before millions on social media, in debates, and on podcasts, and was never once warned about nor protected from the consequences of that exposure by the powerful adults behind the camera. 

Anti-abortion leaders would invite me to “share my story”, instruct me to talk about my rape, and often asked for disturbing elaboration on my abuse. 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. I once heard myself referred to as a weapon, and I was used like one. 

By my 20th birthday, I was exhausted. I became disillusioned with the movement after contending with the constant dehumanization and abuse I witnessed at the highest levels of anti-abortion leadership. I grew more and more concerned with the injuries and deaths of women in states that had recently passed abortion bans, and was brushed off when I raised concerns about these stories internally. I stepped away.

In May of this year, my birth control failed, and I became pregnant. I had just graduated from rehab, where I checked myself in a month prior to treat my alcoholism. While in treatment, I unraveled the immense trauma I experienced as a teenager, including my exploitation at the hands of anti-abortion leaders. When I left, I was finally coping well and ready to start packing for college. 

The news of my pregnancy was devastating. Since beginning treatment, I had to quit my previous job at a local brewery. I applied for many jobs, but at the beginning of summer, no one was hiring. I had no car, no money, no place of my own, and I was about to move to attend school-the first in my family to have access to a college education. Still, I was in a loving, long-term relationship, and I really wanted to be a mother. Desperate, I reached out to a very prominent anti-abortion activist I had worked with previously for financial help. We had not maintained contact in over a year. I also made an appointment for an abortion consultation at Planned Parenthood-just in case. 

The activist I contacted, unbeknownst to me, informed numerous other high-profile anti-abortion leaders about my pregnancy and my appointment. They repeatedly attempted to coerce me into staying with them out of state so they could stop me from receiving abortion care. When that didn’t work, they planned something more drastic. On the morning of June 26th, my boyfriend watched me deny call after call from various national level leaders as we drove to my appointment. I answered the phone once, then hung up after the founder of the extremist “rescue” movement and current presidential candidate Randall Terry asked me if I wanted to be “a murderer”. 

At the clinic, we saw the first activist I contacted looking for me in the parking lot. I realized she and another activist drove eight hours overnight from Washington D.C. to harass, stalk, and intimidate me. She walked into the clinic and sat in front of me after I had already refused to come outside and told her explicitly not to come in. She tried to talk to my boyfriend, asking invasive questions while we exchanged awkward glances. It was mortifying. After I was finally seen and we were able to leave, she blocked his car on the way out to hand me a wilted bouquet of roses.

We got home, and I trashed the flowers. The activists asked to meet with me again to apologize. Exasperated, I agreed, hoping they would leave if I was direct with them. After hours in the summer heat and more offers to take me out of state, they told me I should simply marry my boyfriend. I told them I wanted to, but that it wouldn’t solve my problems. I stated clearly that I intended to have an abortion. The first activist then told me my boyfriend was an abuser who was forcing me to have an abortion. I couldn’t debate this woman about my health, my relationship, or my future any longer. I asked them to take me home. They refused, saying I was “in an unsafe situation”. 

I started walking. 

Those activists then called the police and told them I was suicidal. When paramedics arrived, asked me what happened, realized I was not having a mental health crisis, and saw that they were actually being weaponized to stop me from having an abortion, they brought me home. The activists then filed an order with a judge to have me involuntarily committed to a psychiatric ward for three days. They, of course, had to lie under oath substantially to accomplish that. 

I learned about this when two police cars pulled into our driveway. I screamed for my boyfriend, who immediately ran outside and put himself between me and the policemen. I wailed and clung to him. The officers explained that I didn’t have a choice. I was put into the back of a police car as the possibility of being trapped in the psych ward for weeks raced through my mind. 

I would miss North Carolina’s twelve-week abortion cutoff. I couldn’t afford to go to Virginia. I would be forced to have a baby and watch them suffer as I struggled to care for them. I looked up at my boyfriend, who was standing helplessly in the yard. I touched the bars on the window. They were cold. 

After waiting for hours in the emergency room, I was released from the hospital immediately upon telling my story to the psychiatrist. She described the activists as insane and called their organization a cult. In the affidavit they filed, and directly to multiple people, they stated my seeking an abortion was sufficient evidence I needed involuntary psychiatric commitment. 

It was on one night, about a week afterwards, that I took a set of pills. It was hard and I was scared, but I knew it was not safe to continue my pregnancy. I got a negative test a couple weeks later, and I finally felt free. I was no longer being forced into negotiations for an imaginary hostage. I was a regular person again. I thanked God.

These events of this summer are burned into my memory. I now struggle with going to the doctor and interacting with police officers, which is especially difficult since 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. 

I know those people want me to disappear. I know this story is deeply inconvenient to the narrative that powerful adults, including the leadership of Students for Life, spun around me as a child. However, just like abortion care itself, I’m not going anywhere. 

I was born and raised in western North Carolina. I’ve spent my whole life watching the leadership of Appalachian women. I know what we stand for. We protect our families and communities. We take care of each other. We don’t sit back quietly when the government starts telling people what they can and can’t do in their personal lives. 

Anti-choice organizations are in for a very rude awakening on November 5th. We see what their laws are doing to our sisters, our mothers, and our daughters. We see that anti-abortion activists have no problem injuring us mentally and physically, from locking us behind bars to leaving us dying of sepsis in a hospital bed, so long as they can bend us to their far-right, fundamentalist morality. 

I trust that North Carolinians will deliver a deafening answer to Donald Trump, Mark Robinson, the 102 members of our own legislature who voted to restrict abortion care, and every lobbyist who paid them to do it:

We are not going back. We don’t do that here.