I've long opposed China's "one-child" policy on the simple grounds that it restricts one of the most basic freedoms we are given as human beings: Life.

My opposition turned to disgust and outrage after reading Tom Clancy's "The Bear and The Dragon" several years ago. In Clancy's novel, he describes the plight of a Chinese couple who's first child died and their desire for a second child is thwarted by the Chinese government in the name of population control. The wife gets pregnant anyway, but is discovered by the police. As she is giving birth the baby's head crowns and the Chinese "doctor" prepares to plunge a syringe filled with formaldehyde into the baby's skull. The infanticide is thwarted by the Vatican's ambassador to China and a Chinese priest, both of whom end up giving their lives so that the child might live. In Clancy's novel, once the child is "born," that is completely out of the birth canal, the government is forbidden from following the "one child" policy.

In real life, this isn't true. They will willingly wait until the baby is born before murdering it.

According to Gao Xiaoduan, a former family-planning officer in China, the practice not only scarred women who gave birth to unlicensed children under the policy, but it also destroys the souls of those who enforce it.

Once I found a woman who was 9 months pregnant, but did not have a birth-allowed certificate. According to the policy, she was forced to undergo an abortion surgery. In the operation room I saw how the aborted child's lips were sucking, how its limbs were stretching. A physician injected poison into its skull, and the child died, and it was thrown into the trash can. To help a tyrant do evils was not what I wanted. I could not bear seeing all those mothers grief-stricken by induced delivery and sterilization. I could not live with this on my conscience. I, too, after all, am a mother.

All of those 14 years, I was a monster in the daytime, injuring others by the Chinese communist authorities' barbaric planned- birth policy, but in the evening, I was like all other women and mothers, enjoying my life with my children. I could not five such a dual life anymore. Here, to all those injured women, to all those children who were killed, I want to repent and say sincerely that I'm sorry! I want to be a real human being. It is also my sincere hope that what I describe here today can lead you to give your attention to this issue, so that you could extend your arms to save China's women and children.

This issue is back in the news because President Bush is considering stopping funding to the U.N.'s Population Fund (UNFPA -- it's French, which is why the letters are all out of order), which indirectly supports the barbarous forced abortions in China by purchasing things such as ultrasound equipment, ostensibly for family planning, but which is used to detect women who have unapproved pregnancies.

Foxnews columnist Wendy McElroy reveals what the liberal women's groups think of Bush's possible action.

That may be why President Bush is contemplating exercising his presidential prerogative, under the Kemp-Kasten amendment of 1986, to block foreign funding that supports coerced abortion or involuntary sterilization. The amendment gives the president the sole discretion to stop such funding, and both President Reagan and the first President Bush used the amendment to block monies to the UNFPA due to its involvement with China.

But the president�s actions have sparked an outcry from the National Organization for Women and many feminist voices, who want America to support the UNFPA. But this position ignores the plight of Chinese women and funnels American tax dollars into supporting China�s policy. On this matter, NOW has ceased to be pro-choice: it has become de facto pro-abortion.

The fact that these "women's" groups could support the barbaric practices that Chinese women are forced to undergo speaks volumes about their real concerns. These groups would rather score political points in America, then speak out for suffering women in China who choose to have a baby.