A woman's right is in peril.

• Position: Column

Four days after his second inauguration, George Bush addressed an anti-abortion rally in Washington, D.C., by phone. "The America of our dreams, where every child is welcomed in law, in life, and protected in law, may be some ways away, but even from the far side of the river ... we can see its glimmerings," he told the crowd. "I ask that God bless you for your dedication."

Senator Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas, went even further. "The end of abortion on demand has started," he said to the tens of thousands of people who attended the rally. Interviewed by an antiabortion group at the event, he also said, "This is a pro-life country."

If Bush and Brownback and the anti-abortion movement have their way, it will be, even though the majority of Americans support choice.

But the views of the public are not dominating the debate in Washington and in statehouses around the country, The views of the anti-abortion zealots are.

Even as many pro-choice people have been worrying about the potential calamity that awaits in the Supreme Court, the antiabortion forces have been busy gaining ground elsewhere. The Bush Administration has promoted anti-abortion policies both internationally and domestically. Congress has more fanatical members than ever, none more so than newly elected Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, who advocates the death penalty for doctors who provide abortions. And the action in the states is overwhelmingly hostile.

As a result, a woman in America today has far less freedom to have an abortion than a woman in America the day after Roe v. Wade was handed down in 1973. And for poor women, who are disproportionately of color, that freedom is hanging by a thread.

When Bush submitted his $2.57 trillion budget, he once again failed to provide a single penny to the United Nations Population Fund, which provides more assistance to women in the Third World than any other group.

"The Administration is implementing a stealth campaign to limit women's health programs around the world because they include reproductive health," says Anika Rahman, president of the U.S. Committee for the U.N. Population Fund. "Women's health programs, especially those that provide women with voluntary family planning services, elevate the status of women in their societies, and lead to economic development."

Rahman's group noted that Congress had allocated $34 million this year for the fund, which "could prevent the deaths of 4,700 women who die during childbirth from preventable causes and 77,000 infants and young children who die because their mothers aren't healthy enough to breast feed." And the irony is that these funds could also "prevent two million unplanned and unwanted...