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. 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.
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