"It was a sunny Tuesday morning and one car was in the shop, so David Nova's wife and daughter were taking him to work in the Subaru.

They sang Sheryl Crow songs as they drove to Planned Parenthood of the Blue Ridge's new administrative offices on Peters Creek Road. Halfway there, they remembered Tuesday was the day doctors at the adjoining health clinic performed abortions. It was also the day each week that abortion opponents - sometimes three, sometimes more - gathered outside the clinic to protest.

Jacqueline, newly 9 and in the back seat, would want to know why they were there.

In the past, the Novas had explained his job as Planned Parenthood's president and chief executive officer this way: He was trying to make sure all babies would be wanted, and that women didn't have to have babies if they weren't ready to have them.

On this morning, they explained that people didn't always agree with what Planned Parenthood did, and that they were allowed to say so by picketing outside the building.

Jacqueline accepted their answer, and had a new worry: that the protesters would get hurt standing so close to the road.

The Novas will explain more when she gets older.

As for the larger questions that make Planned Parenthood and her father lightning rods in one of our society's most divisive debates, Jacqueline only knows this: She her trusts her dad.

And certainly nobody can deny what Nova has accomplished within the Planned Parenthood organization. At 39, he is one of the youngest - and, friends and colleagues say, one of the most visionary - CEO's in the national, nonprofit organization.

Under his leadership, the Blue Ridge office became the first Planned Parenthood in the country to offer adoption and prenatal care services, in addition to abortion, all under one roof - a model he hopes other Planned Parenthood affiliates will follow.

If they do, he says, he doesn't expect people's views about abortion to change. But perhaps the toxic atmosphere surrounding it would clear, and people could work for what he calls a 'higher solution.'

Human rights

Nova grew up in New Jersey, the son of a neurosurgeon, with no thoughts of moving to Virginia.

He graduated from Vassar College with degrees in philosophy and psychology, but without the goal of working with women's issues.

Nova, who still looks boyish in a Michael J. Fox/George Stephanopoulos kind of way, does remember that when he was in high school, his ever-busy father talked to him seriously about sex. It wasn't the 'how babies are made' talk; that came when Nova was 7. It was a responsibility talk, and at the end of it, Nova's father handed him a three-pack of condoms. 'I think that had a big effect on me,' Nova said, because so many people see birth control - even talking about birth control - as a woman's job. 'It's a fallacy.' In his work now, he emphasizes that contraception and prevention are the responsibility of both parties.

After college, Nova hiked the Appalachian Trail, Maine to Georgia, then worked for a Boston computer company. During a layoff, he volunteered with Amnesty International and moved to Washington, D.C., where he met his future wife, Faye O'Dell, an Amnesty volunteer and a teacher who worked with emotionally disturbed high school students.

She was wonderful, he said. She was also older and firmly entrenched in Roanoke, with four children. If he was serious about her, he would have to move South.

In 1990, Planned Parenthood of the BLue Ridge, then over 20 years old, was searching for its first public afrairs director. At the time, the Roanoke office was headed by Kathy Haynie Parker and provided low-cost reproductive health care and family planning education. Abortion was still five years off, though lobbying to protect abortion rights would be part of the job.

Nova had been fighting the death penalty through Amnesty. He saw Planned Parenthood, whose targeted clientele included uninsured and Medicaid-eligible women, as a continuation of his human rights work.

Parker offered him the job Jan. 4, 1990, if he could be in Richmond the next day for a meeting. He was there.

He moved to Roanoke and began working with the public, trying to get Planned Parenthood's silent supporters to become more actively involved. He also found himself working in an office that is still largely dominated by women.

'We made him an honorary woman,' said Hazel Bernard, Planned Parenthood's director of development.

'There's a word, misogynist, for a man who doesn't like women as people. I think it's a sad commentary for the English language that there's not a word for the opposite of that.'

Nova, she said 'is whatever that word would be.'

Nobody is pro-abortion

In 1995, Roanoke's Planned Parenthood added abortion to its list of clinic services, and Nova was on hand to help respond to the criticism.

Dealing with abortion issues is not the main part of Nova's job, even as Planned Parenthood's chief, but 27 years after Roe v. Wade, it is abortion that still attracts the most attention from the public and the media, and abortion that prompted a protester to call him 'Satan' as he walked into work recently.

Nobody is pro-abortion, Nova says. But he is in favor of abortion as an option when the physical or psychological well-being of the mother is at stake. He says if people have children when they're ready, they will be better parents.

He also says the controversy over abortion would be dissipated - at least slightly - if more clinics provided a number of ways, including adoption and prenatal care, to deal with unplanned pregnancies instead of just one.

Detractors say Nova is well spoken, too self-assured and that he needs to be saved by Jesus.

He is likable, said Mona Givens, legislative chairman and communications director for the Virginia Society of Human Life. But he has aligned himself with an organization that supports an act she says 'leaves, in its wake, destroyed human beings, shattered lives and grieving women.'

Friends and co-workers describe Nova as energetic and articulate, bright and compassionate. 'Either he's got a great press agent' or he really is those things, said Peter Pufki, executive director of the Children's Home Society, an adoption agency that has a new partnership with Planned Parenthood.

Nova's years in public affairs still show. He is honest but media-savvy, which means his desire to tell you everything battles an acute awareness of saying just the right thing. He knows how he would do things, and he would rather steer than sit in the back seat. 'Sometimes,' he admitted, 'I forget that I'm not everyone's CEO.'

In relating Planned Parenthood's regional history, for instance, he confirmed that when he became CEO in May 1997, the affiliate was in the red about $10,000 a month. But he is reluctant to have the information out there, even now that Planned Parenthood is on firm financial ground. He manages a budget of just under $2 million, supervises a staff of 46, and oversees offices in Blacksburg, Lynchburg, Charlottesville and Albemarle County.

Nova has always favored controversial jobs because there isn't a line of people fighting to take them.

He became CEO in time to work on the capital campaign for Planned Parenthood's new building. Because times were tight, he kept his public affairs job, too.

Pro-choices

The walls in Nova's new office are still nearly bare, but two photos went up right away.

The first is a photo he took at the beach of the large family he embraced when he married Faye. It is near dusk in the picture; skin is tan, smiles are bright.

In front, two young children grin at the camera: Jacqueline, Faye and David's daughter, and Michael, son of Faye's daughter, Shannon.

Shannon was 21 and single when she got pregnant. She knew she had choices concerning her pregnancy.

The Novas told her they would be with her no matter what she decided.

In the end, she decided to have and keep her baby. In the spring of 1991, David Nova served as Lamaze coach for both his wife and his stepdaughter.

The second photo, hanging near shelves that contain books on family planning, reproductive health, Jewish law and Eleanor Roosevelt, shows Nova's mother, wife and then-baby daughter, carrying a Freedom of Choice sign.

Choice.

Nova says that to people on both sides of the issue, 'pro-choice' has come to mean simply 'pro-abortion.'

In his mind, pro-choice means choices - adoption and motherhood, too - and he's careful now to add the 's.'

Soon after he became CEO, Nova looked at adding adoption services through a partnership with Children's Home Society. Now, an adoption agency caseworker rotates part-time - among Planned Parenthood clinics. She is also on call if Planned Parenthood patients request adoption counseling. There have been two Planned Parenthood adoptions since the partnership began in May 1999; at least three are pending.

Givens, of the Virginia Society for Human Life, and other abortion opponents have questioned the sincerity of this part of Planned Parenthood's mission. If they were serious, she said, they would open an adoption agency and stop performing abortions.

The clinic averages fewer than 15 abortions per week.

'One would have to raise an eyebrow or perhaps two when you look at the figures,' she said. 'My skepticism remains.'

Pufki, with the Children's Home Society, which placed some 75 children into adoptive homes last year, has no question about Planned Parenthood's intent - or Nova's. Even though there have been only two adoptions through PIanned Parenthood so far, the counseling they've given women there has helped, Pufki said. Until last month, Roanoke's Planned Parenthood was the only one in the country to offer adoption services. Now Chicago's Planned Parenthood is following the same model.

Prenatal care services began at Planned Parenthood this spring, making the Roanoke-based affiliate the first in the country to offer all pregnancy options. The service is contracted through Carilion physicians, assisted by the health department. In its first full month of providing that service, there were 73 patient visits.

Nova eventually hopes to add male-oriented services at the clinic. The clinic continues to offer women a vast array of health care services including exams, birth control, family planning education and testing for sexually transmitted diseases.

Still, abortion opponents say there is no way to get around what they call the dark side of Planned Parenthood, and that abortion is the worst form of sin. In some areas of the country, there have been clinic bombings and shootings of doctors by people who believe they are called upon to stop abortion.

In Roanoke, there was a threat in January, when Planned Parenthood's office manager received a letter purported to contain spores of the deadly anthrax virus. The letter, sent to 18 other clinics and offices, was investigated by the FBI and turned out to be a hoax.

Nova felt anger over the scare, and some guilt because he hadn't been able to protect his staff.

At home, Faye Nova remembers feeling vulnerable. When a plain brown box was delivered to her door that month, their daughter Jacqueline went running toward it. Faye yelled to stop her, afraid for a moment about what might be inside. It turned out to be something she ordered - L.L. Bean, she thinks - but she remains wary of letters with no return address.

The anthrax scare also bothered the Rev. John Furman, an abortion opponent and minister at Westminster Presbyterian Church of America, which neighbors Planned Parenthood on Peters Creek Road.

He saw Nova on the evening news answering questions about the threat.

'He looked like he'd been through it,' Furman said. The next day, he brought a loaf of his wife's sourdough bread to the clinic.

Furman saw the threat as wrong. He also sees Nova's stance on abortion as wrong, as the antithesis of everything Furman stands for. But he said he doesn't believe abortion will end because of protests or by winning a debate with Nova, who is often called upon to speak, about the issue publicly. Furman said he works against abortion by preaching God's grace. When people find that, he said, abortions will end.

Before the new building went up, Nova, who can see the cross on Furman's church from his office window, asked the minister how he would feel if Planned Parenthood opened a clinic next door. Furman told him the truth. 'It would be like someone painting a swastika across the street from the temple,' he said.

Nova, who is Jewish, understood the analogy. He still feels burdened by it, he said. 'But it doesn't take away from my passion for Planned Parenthood's mission.'

Faith

Every Tuesday, Earlene Kinlaw of Salem stands in front of the Planned Parenthood clinic with the same sign. 'Hitler's Holocaust,' it says at the top, over a graphic picture; 'Planned Parenthood's Holocaust' it says at the bottom, over another.

Hitler decided who should live and who should die, Kinlaw said. She says Planned Parenthood, in providing abortions, does the same thing.

She has met Nova in passing, and she says she spends more time thinking about Jesus than him.

But, 'I pray for him,' she said. 'I pray that the Lord's will will be done, and that he will stop his hands from shedding innocent blood....

He copes in a number of ways.

He tends to see the pressures on the staff before he sees pressures on himself.

His family is supportive - his grandmother, mother, wife and daughter all contributed toward the new building. They center him, he says. His religion centers him.

Nova, who grew up Jewish, strongly embraced his religion when Jacqueline was born.

He began studying the Torah, and reads it aloud for the congregation sometimes, during weekly services. He is a member of Temple Emmanuel, and has served as its president. He also is a member of Beth Israel Synagogue, and has, served as president of the board of Roanoke Area Ministries. He also served on the board of Habitat for Humanity, a traditionally Christian ministry, and organized the building of a Habitat house, the second in the country to be built by Jews.

At the temple, Nova has always been drawn to social action programs, said Rabbi Kathy Cohen. He cares greatly about people, she said, and about spending his time on Earth helping them.

There is a Thomas Merton quote Nova has liked since he was at Amnesty, about using yourself up by surrendering to too many demands, too many projects. 'The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his work for peace,' Merton says.

So Nova, who has a reputation as a gourmet chef, tries to make it home every night to do the cooking, even if he returns to work again afterward.

At night, he stands at the door of his daughter's room and watches her sleep.

Friday nights, he makes a Shabbat meal and goes to temple.

Monday, it is back to work.

Tuesday, he drives past the stalwart protesters, to do the same.

Even without the protesters, Nova is aware of the ethical, moral and religious strain that surrounds his job.

If he ever becomes numb to that, he said, 'it's probably time for me to find another job.'" (Madelyn Rosenberg, The Roanoke Times, August 6, 2000).