February 23, 2010

It's been several years since Lisa Pawlina made the decision to have an abortion -- an abortion she doesn't regret.

"I was a single mom at the time an didn't feel like this was something else I could take on," she said. "I still have the sonogram in my wallet, and just haven't been able to release that to work through the emotions."

It's a decision hundreds of women and couples in the Charlottesville region make every year. According to the Virginia Department of Health, from 1995 to 2008, the rate of abortions has declined from 16.1 per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44 to 10.8 per 1,000.

But numbers are just part of the story. Emotions are the other.

"A lot of women come in a crisis mode or in a mode where they're feeling a lot of fears, a lot of pressures, and that can be a really hard place to make good decisions," said Anna LaBounty of the Pregnancy Centers of Central Virginia.

Pawlina had those fears.

"Shame, and sort of a panic," she said. "I just had a gut feeling that the other person involved was not going to be supportive of it."

"A lot of them are very young, and some of them are high school kids and they feel, 'Well, this is such a chunk of time out of my life. It's nine months," executive director Ron Schneider said. "They don't realize the amount of impact it will have on them for the whole rest of their life."

The Pregnancy Centers of Central Virginia discourage abortions. Schneider said out of 3,000 people a year that the centers see, less than 10 give up their baby for adoption, despite the demand. More than 1 million people in the U.S. say they want to adopt.

"It just doesn't happen all that often because I guess it's a small community," family attorney Elizabeth Coughter said.

Coughter said she's worked on only a handful of newborn adoptions. She says the Charlottesville area lacks the agencies that smooth a process she calls an emotional ride, no matter the outcome.

"It's a death in the family," she said. "It's the most heart-wrenching thing I've been involved in. But on the other side of it, if it goes through, it is one of the most glorious, joyous, happy occasions."

Pawlina said an unplanned pregnancy results in nothing but hard choices.

"If you're pregnant and you decide to have the baby, raise the child yourself, choose adoption, choose abortion -- there's no going back from it," she said. "I mean, you can't undo it."