Type in the word abortion on any Internet search engine, and scores of clinics willing to do the procedure are at your fingertips. Fortunately, there are a few bright beacons of light in this dark cyberocean. Standupgirl.com is one of them.

Sponsored by Oregon Right to Life, the site is positioned and designed to reach girls and young women where they can be found: on the Internet searching for information.

Gayle Attebury, Oregon Right to Life director, says listing the site among abortion domains was only logical. Pro-life advocates will go to pro-life sites, she points out, but there are vast numbers of girls out there who don't think of themselves as pro-life. If they find themselves with an unexpected pregnancy, they'll key in “abortion” to find help.

Standupgirl.com is intentionally neutral in its presentation, not announcing prominently that it is pro-life or Church-based. But the name itself sends an unexpected message, and a tagline announces it's a place where girls share the truth about their crisis pregnancies.

“We're not trying to hide anything,” says Attebury. “We know that kids go to the Web almost exclusively for their information. What we're trying to do is attract the attention and interest of young girls who will stay long enough to get the truth.”

Visitors to the site are introduced to Becky, a young woman who decided to keep her unplanned baby. A “Dear Becky” column allows site visitors to e-mail her about their own concerns and questions.

It also features positive testimonials from other girls who kept their babies or gave them up for adoption. Some relay the heartbreak and regret of choosing abortion. The site provides information on fetal development, ultrasound pictures and references to crisis-pregnancy resources.

Paul Harmon, who manages the Oregon Right to Life office in Corvallis, Ore., came up with the concept as a way to reach local residents and other Oregonians who would not respond to traditional pro-life material.

His foresight has proved prescient. After just two years, Standupgirl.com has exceeded all expectations. The site had a steady flow of 200 to 300 visitors a day through 2001. Then, when Oregon Right to Life was able to pay for better positioning on top search engines like Yahoo and Google, the number of visitors climbed steadily, reaching more than 1.3 million people from the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia and other English-speaking countries as well as a large number of military personnel.

Last October alone more than 100,000 visitors logged onto Standupgirl.com. In addition, when the Wisconsin and Michigan Right to Life offices advertised the site on billboards, online visitors from those two states increased by 75%.

The beauty of the Internet, says Attebury, is that Oregon Right to Life can reach so far beyond its borders.

When Oregon Right to Life tried to get its books and pro-life materials into public school libraries, it was consistently turned down. But data Harmon collected from Standupgirl.com shows that the Web site has allowed the group to reach into the schools in a big way.

Last year, the site had 20,000 visitors who logged on from K-12 public schools and almost 20,000 from universities and colleges. By mid-January this year, more than 1,700 visitors had already been tracked from public schools and universities. And the average duration of the visit was 15 minutes or more — an especially telling and impressive statistic for teen-agers.

Becky's Choice

Becky DeCarle, the “Dear Becky” behind the screen, was a junior in college when she and her boyfriend faced an unexpected pregnancy. The two Catholics would not have considered abortion but decided to get married at the young age of 20. Ten years later, the DeCarles reside in Combermere, Ontario, and have six children.

DeCarle says she feels lucky to have had the support of her parents and boyfriend. She has discovered, from the 25 or 30 weekly e-mails she receives, that most of the girls are not getting support from anyone — not parents, boyfriends, peers or counselors. DeCarle said the girls often write that she was the first person who told them it would be okay to have the baby.

“I find it mind-blowing that there wouldn't be somebody telling them, ‘I'll support you in this, I'll stand by you,’” says DeCarle. “The mother takes the girl to the abortion clinic or the boyfriend drives her in, and the girl says she had the abortion thinking he would stick around, but he didn't. Their own parents abandon them. They are uninformed and desperate.”

DeCarle often feels that her e-mail correspondence is a “last-ditch effort” to save the child and the mother. From the letters she receives by e-mail, most of the girls decide to keep their babies, and the families usually come around to support them. Sometimes she'll get a message from a girl who went ahead with the abortion, but DeCarle doesn't despair.

“Just when I start to get discouraged, I get another beautiful letter,” she said. “It's very fulfilling hearing from girls who have made the right choice and are so happy that they have.”

Everyone's Issue

Oregon Right to Life can directly measure the site's impact from the hundreds of letters that come in to Standupgirl.com. They have also determined from the letters that students are using the site to get information on fetal development and other facts for research papers.

In fact, says Harmon, a Virginia public school has even linked the site to one of its Web pages on teen pregnancy. Oregon Right to Life plans to study Standupgirl.com's name recognition in its next statewide survey. And an expanded plan is under way to build a Web site directed to young men.

“You're taught by the media that this is just a woman's issue,” says Harmon. “But when you read through those letters, you realize that the boyfriend does a lot of pressuring. It's an element of the problem that no one is really addressing.”

Barb Ernster writes from Fridley, Minnesota.