I met Rebecca Naul last week, at the first Abortion In America convening in Austin Texas. The convening, which featured a range of experts and regular people telling their personal stories about abortions and abortion bans, was a beautiful example of community in a time when abortion care is being increasingly threatened. It was also emotionally fraught — listening to stories of people whose lives were turned upside down by the efforts they had to undertake to access reproductive care was disheartening. I was glad to be among them and hearing their stories, but I was also exhausted. After a mentally and emotionally draining day, sitting down with Rebecca Naul was like a strong cup of coffee. She didn’t seem exhausted; she seemed energized – and it reenergized me.
Naul is the founder and creator of INeedAnA.com, a website launched in 2016 that uses three pieces of information (ones that the website says wouldn’t make an individual identifiable and that it doesn’t store) to give people seeking abortions options for possible care. The website shows a seeker the closest clinics to them, offers information on parental consent laws for minors seeking abortion, and if you can’t afford care, it even points you toward abortion funds that can help pay for care.
It was Naul’s own experience getting an abortion in Texas in 2012 that prompted her to start this service. “Like millions of people do every year, I turned to Google to figure out where I could go and what my options were,” she says. “The search results were a mess. The websites were filled with lots of fragmented and out-of-date information. Then, of course, it was also surrounded by anti-abortion propaganda.”
It took Naul days to find the place she would get her abortion and weeks to be seen. As a designer and engineer, her interest was piqued. “I just was like, this is really stupid that this user experience and search experience was so hard,” she says. “I didn’t understand why there wasn’t something better. So I started building the thing that I wish I’d had.”
To learn more about INeedAnA and how people seeking abortions can find help, read the following interview, which has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Teen Vogue: Tell me about what you’ve built at INeedAnA.com
Rebecca Naul: We’ve built a really personalized, and calm, and mobile friendly, and gender-inclusive user experience, on top of being the most comprehensive and updated database of abortion providers. When a user comes to our website, we ask them where they’re located, what the first day of their last period was, and whether or not they’re a minor. We don’t collect any of that data. It only stays on the user’s front-end. It was designed that way to protect people’s privacy from the beginning.
From there, we’re able to show people, even in Texas, you still have options: you can drive to a clinic out of state, you can order safe and effective pills online, and we help people weigh the pros and cons of those options. Then if they’re like, ‘Yeah, driving out of state is the best abortion for me, but I can’t afford it’ [or they] can’t find childcare, we can connect them with local support organizations that can help bridge that gap and make that happen.
TV: What do you think are some difficulties that young people or minors may face that older people might not when they’re seeking abortion care?
RN: The states have really gone after minors even worse [than adults]. Minors are the real canary in the coal mine [for abortion access] everywhere. We see these laws popping up in Idaho, where people can be criminalized for helping a minor get out of state [for an abortion]. It is an absolutely BS law, but it’s on the books. Tennessee has one similarly. [Editor’s Note: The Idaho law is currently being challenged in court, but remains partially in effect. The Tennessee law is currently blocked as a lawsuit makes its way through the courts.] But [there’s a] chilling effect that these laws have, and they really, really, really impact people under 18 significantly more.
RN: I mean, part of it is because I think the trope of the 16-year-old who needs an abortion, and so she drives on a road trip, right? That Hollywood trope is really big, but the actual numbers of people who get abortions under 19 is 8% of people who get abortions, right? And so I think it’s easy in the scale of things to be like, wow, it’s so rare-ish, right? In comparison to everything else, we need to protect the masses. This is progress we can make, and so we’ll make that concession. And I get that you’re between a rock and a hard place of trying to reduce harm at a policy level, but it has really outsized impacts.
TV: What would you say to teens looking for abortion care?
RN: I would say you’re not alone. You’re not the first. This sucks that they made it really hard, but there are a lot of people who are ready and eager to help you, and you can find [a teen’s guide to accessing abortion] at INeedAnA.com.
