A purple cartoon cat named Gataranda has become one of the most effective messengers for abortion rights in Latin America. That's not because the cat itself matters — it's because Jacarandas, a Colombian helpline, understood something basic: teenagers don't connect with diagrams of burning uteruses.
When abortion was decriminalized in Colombia in 2022, a team of women — a lawyer, psychologist, nurse, and social worker — started answering questions on WhatsApp. But they quickly realized their audience needed something different from traditional reproductive health campaigns. "A lot of people do not connect with [an image of] the uterus on fire, so we thought 'what can we do to connect more with young women?'" says Carolina Benítez Mendoza, the organization's deputy director.
They commissioned street artists and graphic designers. They created TikTok videos. They showed up at music festivals and comic book conventions. They sold merchandise to fund travel for people who couldn't reach clinics. The name itself — jacaranda, a purple flowering plant — has nothing to do with abortion. It's just a signal: this is not your parents' reproductive rights organization.
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The strategy has worked at scale. Jacarandas is now the most-followed abortion account in the Spanish-speaking world, with nearly 400,000 followers on TikTok and 312,000 on Instagram. Since launching, the team has received messages from over 26,300 people. In 2025 alone, they provided advice to about 700 users each month.
Beyond the helpline
But Jacarandas does more than answer questions. When a woman attended a clinic for an abortion and was threatened, criticized, and given inadequate pain management by medical staff, the Jacarandas lawyer took the case. A Colombian court ruled it was "obstetric violence" — the first such ruling in the country connected to abortion care. The court also found the insurance company had violated her dignity by asking her father for permission despite her being an adult.
This work matters because decriminalization alone doesn't guarantee access. A 14-year-old who needs an abortion doesn't need to know a court ruling. She needs to know where to go, and that someone will believe her when she gets there.
The organization is now training other groups across Latin America on branding, content strategy, and how to reach young people. But they're also facing real pressure. Between September and December 2025, Meta restricted Jacarandas' WhatsApp line four times, forcing them to switch temporarily to Telegram. The organization says this is part of a broader pattern of digital censorship; Meta denies its policies have changed.
For Viviana Bohórquez Monsalve, Jacarandas' director and a lawyer who has campaigned for abortion rights for two decades, the moment feels fragile. "Now, we are in a good moment in Colombia — we're in the honeymoon period," she says. "But the US shows it's never ending. You have to keep working."
What Jacarandas has built — a helpline that meets people where they are, with the aesthetic and tone they actually respond to — is spreading across Latin America. The purple cat was never the point. The point was understanding that access to reproductive rights requires meeting young women on TikTok, not in a textbook.
