>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.
>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.)https://www.cosmopolitan.com/lifestyle/a69167837/charlotte-isenberg-anti-abortion-activist-story/You are in denial if you believe this isn’t the end goal of American conservatives: having pregnant people involuntarily committed to mental hospitals and prison for seeking abortion care. Working-class/proletarian women will be the most affected by this.
>american
>woman
who gives a fuck lol
>>2559345You can’t see how this is fascism coming home?
>>2559345PAAU are a Heritage Foundation front group made up of fake “leftists” who are paid to infiltrate and disrupt leftist spaces.
I see your point but how is this anything new? Has there been some kind of big change in abortion politics I haven't seen?
>>2559332>abortionNon-issue used to cover class based politics. Dont fall for these tricks.
>>2559449It has way more to do with the coming police state. Stop thinking everything is “idpol”.
>>2559449"how do you do fellow commies?"
>>2559332>American woman she's a former anti-abortion activist. this is all she ever wanted
>>2559597She quit PAAU and changed her views before this happened.
>>2559346Fascism is better than a fake democracy, fascism is honest.
>>2559332Charlotte should sue the fuck out of PAAU. That's what I would do if I was in her position.
>>2559396I fucking hate TradCaths.
>>2559545>Stop thinking everything is “idpol”.No.
>>2559345i do
>>2559597many such cases, doesn't mean that their unwanted children deserve to live with them. same with children of rape pregnancies
>>2559332I won’t be surprised if states like Texas and Florida try pulling this as part of their laws.
>>2559623I hope one day you find yourself in a concentration camp thinking "well, at least they don't pretend the department of defense is about defense"
>>2559449fuck off you fucking polyp
>>2559930Two-thirds of anti-abortion groups in the US are spin-offs of Operation Rescue and most of the top anti-abortion leaders are former OR members. Frank Pavone, Monica Miller, Jeff White, Bryan Kemper, Erik and Tina Whittington, Randy Alcorn, the list goes on. Abby Johnson was brought into the Catholic Church by Pavone when he was still a priest. Plus, many of these groups are funded by the Heritage Foundation and Leadership Institute (which itself is a HF front).
Imagine if any other political movement was made up of leaders who all came out of the same place, were the same ones running the movement for the past 20-30 years, and all run multiple front organizations on the low. Don’t know about you, but I get the impression the anti-abortion movement is full of money laundering.
What’s the big deal? Stalin also opposed abortion. So did Hoxha.
>>2561971Those aren't communists.
>>2559346>Implying America isn't already fascist and has been since its inceptionI love radlibs, you guys are so retarded it's almost cute.
>>2561974>fascism is when LE BAD thing happensgenius
>>2561971both have had very compelling material reasons to ban it in their times (namely, war) and previously (
before outlawing abortion) significantly improved the conditions for parents to have and raise children in their countries, neither of them also banned contraceptives all unlike ceausescu the idealism enjoyer
do you think trump or the us in general have done any of the above?
>>2559332What are you arguing for my nyugha?
>>2562635Those “socialist” abortion bans were also miserable failures. Infant mortality during the Soviet ban skyrocketed. Half of all maternal deaths in Hoxha’s Albania were caused by illegal abortions. This is in spite of both countries having free healthcare, housing, and childcare like PAAU wants.
Also, Maria Mies points out that the pro-Natalie’s policies in the Soviet Bloc countries caused a lot of resentment among the women of those nations. As men got more leisure time due to technology making their jobs more efficient, women often found themselves working two — or sometimes three — jobs since they were expected to be mothers to a lot of children inside the home AND build up the productive forces outside the home. So, when the USSR re-legalized abortion, Soviet women began aborting like crazy because they didn’t want to put in all the work raising a bunch of kids, especially when the men were never expected to sacrifice their leisure time to do the same.
>>2563124>Those “socialist” abortion bans were also miserable failures. Infant mortality during the Soviet ban skyrocketed. Half of all maternal deaths in Hoxha’s Albania were caused by illegal abortions.this is true and i agree the results were more of a failure, i suppose that in stalin's case at least part of the decision was also both a lack of foresight stemming from idealism/overestimation of concrete advancements in the material conditions of soviet parents and no similar experiences of making abortion illegal again given it being once legal and state-sponsored, which would demonstrate the inevitable RETVRN to illegal abortions. can't speak about hoxha's case being influenced by not having similar experiences in socialist states however
>This is in spite of both countries having free healthcare, housing, and childcare like PAAU wants.this is even more ridiculous from PAAU, an organization in 21st century that is not only completely able to look back at the past experiments of various other countries under different economic systems, but has also NOT provided yet any of the "wants" stated despite abortion already being outlawed
>So, when the USSR re-legalized abortion, Soviet women began aborting like crazy because they didn’t want to put in all the work raising a bunch of kids, especially when the men were never expected to sacrifice their leisure time to do the same.wasn't medical abortion also used as a kind of birth control before widespread contraception measures being available?
>>2563150PAAU claims to be intersectional feminists or some shit. So, not MLS but liberals and SocDems. You can just take a look at their IG page @PAAUnow to get a glimpse of what they believe and how stupid their overall ideology is.
Ask them how they believe a future socialist society should be organized and they’ll tell you nothing. Because they’re dumb and have no clue.
>>2562759>bragging about breaking federal law>using their real names and facesFed shit.
>>2559332OP should've been aborted.
>PAAU bitch gets her comeuppance
oh no. oh dear
>>2568466She became pro-choice before her abortion.
Is it fascism yet, or do we need gay ass military marches LARPing as ancient rome?
>>2567854I’ll let comrades in Memphis know this.
>>2567854>>2570219This is the PP that they’ll be attempting to hold hostage.
I find it telling how open they’re being about their plans.
>>2571509amazing to me how you are still literally obsessed with these people after all these years.
>>2569723Fascism is when the government's boot does stuff.
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