The Bush administration is resisting the male partners' efforts to get asylum, even though the Republican congressman who wrote a 1996 asylum law said it was intended to cover men as well as women who are victims of China's controversial family-planning policy. There is no dispute that women can seek asylum under the law.

The justices will consider appeals by two men in the coming weeks.

U.S. courts have taken varying approaches to claims by Chinese men that they should be allowed to stay in the United States because they have suffered under a policy that generally limits couples to one child.

China prohibits marriage until the man is 22 and the woman is 20, but the government concedes that many people enter into traditional marriages at younger ages.

Still, authorities sometimes force abortions or sterilization on people who seek to have children even though they are not legally married or who want more than one child, according to the State Department's most recent human-rights report for China, issued in March.

U.S. immigration authorities and some courts have seized on the distinction between traditional and legal marriage to deny asylum.

Yi Qiang Yang was 20 when he married his 17-year-old wife in a traditional ceremony. More than a year later, Yang's wife was eight months pregnant when authorities forced her to have an abortion.

Yang fled, fearing persecution for trying to have a child outside China's strict rules, and eventually asked for asylum in the United States. Immigration officials and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta turned him down, in part because the marriage was not legal. "Legal marriage reflects a sanctity and long-term commitment that other forms of cohabitation simply do not," the appeals court said.

The administration, which has criticized China's human-rights practices, said the decision was correct. "An applicant who participates in a traditional marriage ceremony, but is not legally married, is not automatically deemed eligible for asylum if his partner is forced to undergo an abortion," Solicitor General Paul Clement wrote.

Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R., N.J.), a frequent critic of China's human-rights practices, said the administration was in essence blaming the victim.

Smith wrote the 1996 law that he said was designed to expand eligibility for asylum and erase uncertainty that both partners would be covered.

"Not to include both when both are harmed irreparably would be a gross miscarriage of justice," Smith said. "These are bona fide marriages. But even if this were boyfriend-girlfriend, what would happen if the couple defended their unborn child? She gets asylum and he doesn't?"

A second case that the court could soon consider involves just such an arrangement. Zen Hua Dong contends his fiancee was forced to have two abortions and he was threatened with sterilization by local officials.

Immigration judges denied his asylum application because he is not married.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York went further, however, saying the law does not cover even spouses in legal marriages.

Smith and former Rep. Henry J. Hyde, who has since died, urged the Justice Department to take an expansive position on who is eligible for asylum.