Protecting women and girls in China, where one child per family is the rule – and a boy the preference.

Decades of infanticide has skewed China's population: China's boy to girl ratio, 110 to 100 in 2000, shot up to 118 to 100 in 2005, according to official figures.

Chai's audience in the Virginia church looked on in horror as she screened a slide show filled with photos taken in secret at China's squalid abortion clinics and detention centers, where disheveled pregnant women sobbed.

Chai said the idea of the charity project stemmed from her assignment last fall as an interpreter at a congressional hearing on China's one-child policy, where an abused Chinese woman testified.

Shrouding her face with a black veil (for fear of retribution), a soft-spoken woman with the pseudonym Jian Wu recounted how she was tortured by officials in her town. Ms. Wu, carrying her second child, came out from hiding after her father was severely beaten by authorities. She was dragged to an abortion clinic.

"Her [Wu's] only crime was being a mother," Chai says.

Now herself a mother of three girls, ages 5, 7, and 9, Chai is using seed money from the Jenzabar Foundation, the charitable arm of her fledging software business, to drive her human rights endeavor. She is partnering with and funding local women's rights groups in China. One day, she hopes to change the minds of China's birth control officials.

Xingdou Hu, a professor of economics and China issues at the Beijing Institute of Technology, says Chai's efforts are admirable, but she faces an uphill battle.

"[The] Chinese government is very cautious of any foreign entity trying to mess with its domestic affairs [such as the one-child policy], especially one with [a] religious tone," he explains.

What the country needs to do is provide pensions and basic insurance to its poor rural population, he says. Then they wouldn't have to rely on "having male offspring to care for them when they grow old," he says.

Chai converted to Christianity in April, a process that she says renewed her life.

"I thought I found a solution to China's problems by studying the democratic model of Taiwan," says Chai of the research she did in earning a master's degree in international relations at Princeton University in New Jersey.

But the US consultancy firms and banks with business ties in China that hired her after graduation weren't interested in causing trouble with the Chinese government.

"It turns out God gave me a new calling instead – to help China's women and girls," Chai now says.

• For more stories about people making a difference, go here.

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