Rebecca Nall was watching the numbers go up, and she needed to make a decision. Nall — the founder of I Need An A, an online directory of abortion providers — was in the running for multiple website domain names at an auction, but bids were rising fastest on the one she wanted the most: abortion.org.
A week had sped by since entrepreneur Rob Schutz first flagged the auction. Knowing the competition for these domains would be stiff, Nall had pulled together a funding appeal to donors, but it wasn’t an unlimited budget.
She was in constant communication with Schutz, who was on the other side of the country from Nall’s California office. He had been monitoring the auction while driving his family home from vacation, but needed to find a place to pull over. He parked at a rest stop off the New Jersey Turnpike. While his kids played in the backseat under his wife’s watch, he hopped out to focus fully on the intense bidding war playing out on his phone.
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Together, Schutz and Nall locked in to the final minutes of the auction for Abortion.org, which until recently forwarded to an Alabama adoption agency’s page “for expectant women.”
Schutz and Nall were neck-and-neck with another aggressive bidder who kept driving the price up. They decided to focus all their energy on the rapidly growing five-figure bids for Abortion.org, abandoning the other domain auction they had also been bidding on.
It paid off: Schutz emerged victorious, and his family cheered at the rest stop. (Nall declined to share how much they paid beyond stating it was “five figures.”)
Schutz is no stranger to these blood-bumping exchanges. He founded Snagged.com, a service that helps companies obtain high-value domain names, and often through auctions. Sometimes there are errors with the auction, he said, so it takes a couple of days to settle in that it’s real.
This win was legitimate, so he transferred the domain to Nall, who began building a new website. And then, for what is likely the first time, Abortion.org actually contained factual information about abortion.
The web is an invisible battleground where search engine optimization, website redirects and digital ads can deliver people looking for information on abortions to anti-abortion websites and medical misinformation. With Abortion.org in the hands of I Need An A, accurate information on abortion will become easier to find. The short name will also insulate it against changing search engine algorithms.
When Nall started I Need An A in 2016, Abortion.org was already taken. She noticed many other domains linked to abortion keywords redirected to anti-abortion websites. Nall connected with Schutz over social media, and he kept an eye on her domain wishlist for years.
This past summer, a ton of domains related to abortion became available all at once. Schutz said it’s not clear why that happens; sometimes people just get tired of paying for domains they’ve hoarded. Or they die and miss enough payments that the domains go back on the market.
In the weeks before the auction, Nall had seen more and more ads for anti-abortion groups competing for the same keywords as her. The barrier to entry for web design has dropped dramatically with the advent of generative AI, and she’s seen a glut of new highly-optimized anti-abortion websites show up on searches. “They’re extremely robust, and they’re trying to reach people before real resources do, and deceive them, and talk them out of an abortion,” Nall said.
Tech companies like Google have tried to filter out deceptive websites by labelling whether the owner provides abortions. But that also captures websites like I Need An A, which provides only information about where to find abortions, not clinical services.
That’s why getting the domain name was so important to her.
Part of the reason Nall chose the name “I Need An A” is because it offers some anonymity; the word “abortion” won’t appear in anyone’s browsing history. She’s planning on keeping that as the main brand, but a single-word domain like Abortion.org opens up many opportunities.
Domain names can be hugely influential — truly.
Abortion.org has a very real air of authority, Schutz said. The top-level domain “.org” indicates “mission over money,” in his eyes. That communicates trust to anyone stumbling across the site.
But for many years, visitors were pointed in a different direction. The Internet Archive first saved a screenshot of Abortion.org in 2000. A marketing agency sat on the domain, and then by 2005 it was redirecting users to “The Experts in Abortion Alternatives.” It briefly changed hands to a site unrelated to abortion. Then, in 2022 — possibly earlier — it sent users to a site professing to “save babies, moms, families from abortion.”
“We’re really looking at a long-term plan of helping anyone on the internet find comprehensive, accurate, and up-to-date information,” Nall said. “So we see abortion.org being a place to house all of those properties as they grow and being the umbrella landing page.”
She said a version of the online abortion provider directory for Mexico is coming soon.
The donors who helped fund the auction were excited about how the new domain could increase the accessibility of abortion.
“We are not affiliated with any one provider or any one provider network. We show people all of their options, so folks were excited in particular for us to bid on it because of that independent perspective that’s really focused on the end abortion seeker,” Nall said.
She was still nervous about the purchase. The cost of the domain could, for instance, have paid for many abortions — “one of the most impactful things you can do with money,” Nall believes.
After weighing the advantages, the organization decided the investment was worth it.
