Atlanta’s Newest Abortion Provider Tests Southern Market

Carafem provides the abortion pill for women who are less than 10 weeks pregnant. The way that works is, a woman will usually take one pill with a doctor at this clinic, and a second pill later on, usually at home.

“So we help them kind of plan out the next 72 hours,” Grant said. “Where do you expect you’ll be? Where can you have some privacy if you need it? Is there somebody supportive who can be with you at this time? Can somebody watch the kids? Those are the kind of real life questions that we ask in addition to these are the medicines; this is how it works. This is what’s normal and this is what’s not.”

“It’s just so unusual to have an abortion clinic open,” said Elizabeth Nash, senior state issues manager with the Guttmacher Institute, which studies reproductive health policies in the U.S.

“Particularly to have a clinic open in the South is incredibly important because, as we’ve seen since 2010, there has been this onslaught of abortion restrictions being enacted,” she said.

Nash said Carafem is certainly bucking the overall trend. That might be true in more ways than one. Like, in the way they advertise.

In an online video ad, three women dressed like 1950’s housewives sit around a coffee table discussing another woman’s abortion, using euphemisms like “went to the countryside,” until the camera pans to the side. Then, a millennial woman in pink pumps with an iPhone in her hand confidently says “Oh, you’re talking about abortions.”

Cut to the tagline: “Because there’s no shame in it. Abortion. Yeah, we do that.”

  “Abortion. Yeah, we do that” is one of Carafem’s lead ad campaigns in Washington, D.C., where their other clinic is located. Last year a weekly paper in D.C. briefly refused to run their ad. They’ve run into trouble recently with bars declining to run a different ad promoting their contraception services.

Targeted Advertising

“What’s very interesting here is these [types of] campaigns address things that are difficult to talk about privately, much less publicly,” said Mark Pettit, CEO of Creaxion, a marketing firm headquartered in Atlanta that handles clients ranging from Coca-Cola to Center for Disease Control and Prevention researchers studying sexually-transmitted infections. Pettit said with topics that some feel are taboo, clients don’t always opt for loud strategies.

“In my experience, these providers sometimes didn’t want to advertise,” Pettit said. “Didn’t want the general public to know where their facilities were because they feared an attack or a bombing or a shooting. So it’s literally come out of the closet I think.”

He said going with highly visible ads is a choice.

“There are ways to get very targeted with advertising. For instance, we can target women 25-35 who have certain likes or have liked certain pages,” said Pettit.

Carafem does have a targeted online presence, but this summer it also posted billboards along the Downtown Connector and around Interstate-285. The message was a little more subtle than the D.C. ad. They said, “Doors open in Atlanta.”

“It’s working because we’re talking about it, right? That’s part of the strategy,” Pettit said. “They’re doing things to be purposefully controversial. And how do you do that? With your messaging. I think it’s very strategically crafted. They know what they’re doing.”

The ads are bright pink. Some of them feature emojis. Most have the word “abortion” pretty visible.

“We want people to know, and we can’t stand back and pretend like it’s not an important piece of what we do,” Grant said. “We believe that that’s part of what normalizing this procedure is.”

Because it’s not abnormal, Grant said. According to the Guttmacher Institute, roughly one in three American women will have an abortion before age 45.

Reducing Stigma

Emily Matson is the executive director of Georgia Life Alliance, an anti-abortion advocacy group. She’s not comfortable with too relaxed an atmosphere around the issue.

“Certainly the focus is to give women the message, this is like any other procedure you might participate in, such as an eyebrow wax or a massage and we’re going to try to cloak it in that frame,” Matson said.

Matson is a big supporter of what are often called crisis pregnancy centers – faith-based centers that encourage women who might be considering abortions to give birth. Many of those centers also frame their work as supporting open conversation, so the question of reducing stigma can be a tricky one for some anti-abortion advocates.

“In this conversation about getting rid of stigma, there’s zero conversation about the baby,” said Matson. “And I think that’s where my side of the coin maybe goes too far sometimes and they talk only about the baby, and the stigma comes where the mother’s just a killer, and that’s going way too far in the other direction.”

Georgia now offers state funding for crisis pregnancy centers, which anti-abortion advocates have gradually rebranded as “pregnancy resource centers.” It was Matson’s group that successfully pushed for legislation allowing that funding last year.

“There is pushback about abortion care in every state in the United States and around the world, so that was something that we were prepared for. Having a bit of an unapologetic tone about abortion was intentional on our part,”Carafem’s Grant said.

She said “Abortion. Yeah, we do that” will be part of their campaign in Atlanta eventually. The more subtle approach so far has been an effort to introduce themselves to the community, rather than to play down their characteristic boldness, she said. Carafem has been raising money for an ad in what they call “a major conservative newspaper.”