All Carole Alexander wanted was a man to love her. What she got was pregnant at age 19.

She briefly considered an abortion, and went so far as going to a clinic for the procedure. But she found she couldn't go through with it. She found herself without a boyfriend, a dropout from college and a single mother with almost no one to lean on. When her son was a year old, she moved from Michigan to St. Petersburg, Fla., to be near her mother, and to start over.

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Click here for audio and photos of fathers at the Pinellas County Father Services annual softball tournament. Click here for a graphic showing local teen pregnancy rates.

Hard as it was, Alexander looks back on it now and believes she was blessed. Her son Scott turns 30 this month. She eventually married, had a daughter and helped raise her husband's children.

And she's taken the painful lessons from her own life and turned them into cause. As director of the St. Petersburg Pregnancy and Family Resource Center in Midtown, Alexander shares her story with hundreds of young women who are facing life-changing decisions about sex and motherhood.

What she preaches is abstinence.

"Sex is so common. That's the kind of thing that's so detrimental," Alexander said. "(Girls) don't understand they have choices."  

Mallary Tenore/PointsSouth Carole Alexander, director of the St. Petersburg Pregnancy and Family Resource Center, preaches abstinence to women and helps run workshops related to maternal and prenatal health and infant-toddler care.

While the number of teenagers giving birth has decreased in recent years in Florida, it is on the increase in the Midtown neighborhood of St. Petersburg, giving  urgency to Alexander's mission.

Of the 434 total births last year in Midtown, more than 20 percent were to mothers under 20 -- twice the rate statewide. The number of teenagers in Midtown giving birth has steadily increased, from 52 in 2002 to 90 in 2006, according to the Pinellas County Department of Health.

Faith-based organizations such as Alexander's are at the heart of President Bush's goal to reduce teen pregnancy through abstinence-only sex education.

Critics, and recent studies, challenge the effectiveness of an abstinence-only approach.

Clésha Lewis, 15, came to the Family Resource Center in late June after giving birth to her son. She watches movies about infant care and shops at the center's gift store. Still, motherhood seems foreign to her.

"I thought it was going to be so easy," says Lewis, who is raising the boy with her own mother. "He doesn't eat on his schedule. It was fun when he first arrived but now he cries in the middle of the night. I don't sleep at all."

Despite the support she gets at the center, Clésha doesn't think taking abstinence courses would have prevented her from getting pregnant.

"They don't work," she says. "Sometimes talking about it makes people want to (have sex) more."

The center has an annual budget of $95,791, which primarily pays for services for parenting and pregnant women and their families. Nearly a third of the money comes from grants from Pinellas County and the city of St. Petersburg, the Midtown Health Council and the Florida Pregnancy Support Services Program. The rest is pieced together from fundraisers and donations from people, churches and community organizations.

Mallary Tenore/PointsSouth Alexander ties the laces of baby shoes in the pregnancy center’s mother and baby boutique. Women buy baby supplies at the boutique using points they earn through the center’s Gaining Opportunities Achieving Life Success, or GOALS, program.

A nonprofit Christian organization, the Family Resource Center offers workshops on topics such as abstinence and sexual integrity, maternal and prenatal health, nutrition and wellness, and infant-toddler care.

Alexander is one of three paid employees at the center. According to the organization's records, Alexander works about 30 hours a week and is paid $18,000 a year.

An estimated 1,250 clients visit the center each year. About 300 of those are teenage mothers. The center conducts free pregnancy tests. Last year, 600 women sought tests. Half of them were teenagers.

In teaching abstinence, Alexander relays the trials she faced as a young mother.

"When I share my story," she says, "you can see the light bulb go off and they realize, 'She's not just talking at me. She's been around the block.' "

Alexander also counsels women about abortion alternatives, and post-abortion healing and recovery.

She wishes someone had done that for her when she was 19.

After she got pregnant, Alexander visited an abortion clinic on Central Avenue in St. Petersburg, but learned that her father's insurance would only pay for the procedure in a hospital. Scheduled to go to the hospital the next day, Alexander cried through the night. Her mother told her she didn't have to go through with it.

Alexander dropped out of the University of Michigan, where she was studying special education, and got a bank teller job in St. Petersburg. Her son was 8 when she married. She and her husband, who have since divorced, had a daughter, Danielle. Alexander considers herself the mother of six: she raised Scott, Danielle and her husband's cousin, and was stepmother to three children from his first marriage.

Now many consider her the mother of the Family Resource Center.

Single mother Latasha Askew, 21, goes to the center to watch videos about raising children. For each video, she earns 10 "baby bucks" to spend in the center's mother and baby boutique. The bucks buy her clothes and diapers for her three children. Talking with Alexander and Brown, she says, has been especially helpful.

"They're not only counselors," Askew says. "They've been my friends."

Alexander has counseled girls as young as 11 who come to the center for pregnancy tests. She helps clients set personal and educational goals.

"We talk one-on-one with women about their choices, and about advantages and disadvantages," Alexander says, sitting at the center's main desk, a wall of baby dresses hanging behind her.

In the last 12 months, an estimated 200 young women have attended an initial abstinence class. Only 16, however, have completed the abstinence and sexual integrity courses. Still, Alexander believes they work.

Alexander and her client services director, Alfreda Brown, 57, show videos called "Go APE!" for "Abstinence Protects Everyone." Clients sit in a room with signs reading, "Ride the Abstinence Wave -- It's your Lifesaver."

Some of the women Alexander and Brown teach are already sexually active. In such cases, the counselors set less ambitious goals, such as abstaining from sex for a few months and then renewing that commitment. Those who have never had sex are more likely to continue to abstain, Brown says.

She believes sexual integrity is the key to abstinence.

"I will ask the girls, 'Why are you giving yourself to him if he's no good?' " Brown says. "For me, abstinence is about saving the lives of our girls."

A recent national study by the Mathematica Policy Research Inc. found that teenagers enrolled in abstinence-only sex education are just as likely to have sex as those not enrolled.

Unlike the Family Resource Center, which takes an abstinence-only approach, the YWCA of Tampa in St. Petersburg offers abstinence-plus classes with information about birth control. The YWCA works in collaboration with Pinellas County public schools to provide resources to teenage mothers.

The numbers of middle-school children giving birth and of teens getting pregnant multiple times are particularly troubling, says Avery Slyker, director of youth programs at the YWCA.

Abuse may be partly to blame. Sixteen percent of the girls in the YWCA program last year were reported victims of sexual abuse or domestic violence, Slyker says.  

Jessica Raymond, 20, is raising a 2-year-old son with her fiancé and getting help from the YWCA to pay for college. She doesn't believe abstinence-only courses work.

"If you're young and your hormones are racing," she says, "then it's going to happen."

When Alexander hears comments like these, she turns to her 20-year-old daughter, Danielle, who has completed 10 abstinence-only courses. She started taking the classes when she was 11, and sees premarital sex as a risk and a distraction.

"I have goals that I've stood for all my life," says Danielle, who is studying primary education at St. Petersburg College. "I don't have to depend on a guy to make me happy."

Though she wants to have children someday, she wants to be married first. She credits her mom with that lesson.

"Different things happened in her life," she says. "I can make the choice that they won't happen in mine."

CORRECTION: This article was corrected July 4, 2007. The description of St. Petersburg Pregnancy and Family Resource Center's sources of funding was inaccurate.