This Former Anti-Abortion Activist Is Opening Up About Why She Changed Her Mind

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Note: this story contains mentions of sexual assault and pregnancy loss. 

At only 21 years old, North Carolina college student Charlotte Isenberg has already gone through a pretty profound ideological shift on the subject of abortion. As a teenager, she became a prominent anti-abortion activist, but this year, she publicly came out in support of the procedure — and actually had an abortion herself. Here's her story and why she ultimately changed her mind:

When she was only 15 years old, Charlotte became pregnant as a result of sexual assault. She planned to keep the baby but miscarried. She told BuzzFeed that she took to the internet as an outlet for her trauma and grief. "For people who grew up in southeastern traditional culture like I did, you don't talk about those things with even your family a lot of the times here. So I started talking about them on social media, and I used my Twitter kind of like a diary."

But her posts didn't just connect her with other teens who had been through similar situations. Charlotte says they also drew the attention of grown-up anti-abortion activists, who she now believes exploited her story for their movement. She told BuzzFeed that, at first, their attention felt really affirming. "It gave me a target for a lot of my anger and pain, which I had no way to deal with, and it also gave me a lot of validation from adults. These were the only people in my life who were telling me that this is a horrible thing that happened to you. And also, we're proud of you, and I didn't realize that I was being exploited."

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"So, for the next five years, I was like a rising star in anti-abortion spaces," she explained. "Anti-abortion leaders put a camera in my face and platformed me before millions of people on their social media and in their debates and on podcasts. And never, once, warned me about or protected me from the consequences of that sort of exposure."

When she was 20, Charlotte says she started to question some of the things people in the anti-abortion movement had told her about the procedure because someone close to her shared that they had had an abortion. "That was eye-opening for me because I'd never talked to somebody who had an abortion and who didn't feel bad about it."

Charlotte also started to realize that some of her beliefs about abortion that she had learned from other activists were blatant misinformation. She told BuzzFeed that activists had misrepresented the very rare risks of infertility following an abortion and frightened her with claims that all abortion is coerced. "It was really horrific," she reflected.

"So I started talking more with the people around me about abortion and kind of unraveling these beliefs," Charlotte explained. Then, after her birth control failed, Charlotte became pregnant and realized that she wasn't ready to become a parent.

At this point in her story, Charlotte still had deep ties to the anti-abortion movement, so she told a fellow activist she was considering the procedure. Unfortunately, that person harrassed Charlotte over her decision and called emergency services on her, falsely claiming that she was actively suicidal. Charlotte was picked up by police and taken to an Emergency Room in handcuffs. Charlotte says, "I was a perfectly sane, stable, well-spoken adult who was quickly released from the ER when the psychiatrist talked to me and was like, 'This is a crazy situation. You're clearly fine.'" But the experience left her shaken and scarred.

So Charlotte ended up doing something she had publicly crusaded against for years — having an abortion and leaving the anti-abortion movement behind.

In a now-viral TikTok, Charlotte explained why she decided to share her change of heart, saying, "The anti-abortion establishment can smear me as much as it wants. I know I'm not their golden child anymore, and they're not going to pull any punches because what I'm saying is dangerous to them. And I obviously have nothing to gain from saying this all very publicly, personally, except for a lot more harassment and a lot more threats. The only reason I'm saying this is so that maybe, hopefully, it stops one more family from having to go through what we went through and maybe hopefully changes one person's mind about their hardline stance on abortion. And if I've done even that, I consider all of this worth it."

In this era of political polarization, it feels pretty rare to see people who are so willing to publicly change their minds about big issues like abortion. For Charlotte, there were two big things that held her back from admitting that she'd changed her views. She told BuzzFeed, "One thing that I extend to as a grace to people who are anti-abortion and evangelical and deeply conservative — a lot of these people are in cults. Even if they're not in 'cults' in the way that we traditionally think about them, they're still in a cult, and ultimately, they're victims who have been abused in their own capacities."

High exit costs for leaving a group are among some of the most often-cited signs of a high-control group or cult, and Charlotte certainly experienced shunning, threats, and intimidation after leaving the anti-abortion movement. She told BuzzFeed, "I got endless harassment and serious death threats that I had to report to the police, report to my college, report in my professors, and then ultimately, I left my school for a week because there was a genuine safety concern that someone would try and assassinate me. And so, that's terrifying."

But there was another reason why she didn't initially speak up when she started to change her mind. "It's embarrassing," she admitted, "and I hate to say that because I don't want to take away from the severity of the rhetoric."

Now, Charlotte is sharing her story in hopes of opening people's eyes on both sides of the abortion debate. To people who are on the fence about reproductive rights, she says, "It's going to affect the very foundations of our society when women have to live in fear of going through something like what I did. And if that can happen to me, it can happen to absolutely anyone, like, these people have no problem eating their own."

And she hopes that people who support reproductive freedom can extend some empathy to others who she says are being used as pawns by anti-abortion activists. "It's not just me that was initiated into this movement when I was a child. There is a seriously unspoken-about epidemic of children in anti-abortion spaces who are put on a pedestal and who are exploited."

As I learned Charlotte's story, I was really struck by two things: First, learning about someone else's lived experience with abortion was a catalyst for her changing her mind. This shows that when we speak up about what we've been through, it matters. Second, it hit me that shame and embarrassment over changing our minds, or "flip-flopping," may be a silent factor in political polarization in the US. I don't have all the answers, or even just one answer, but I think normalizing changing your mind when you learn new things could be one place to start.

What stands out to you about Charlotte's story? Have you ever completely changed your mind about a serious issue like abortion? Is there something you're a little embarrassed to admit that you used to believe in? Let's talk about it all in the comments.

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