What happened
Local family planning officials operated under strict birth quotas and faced their own career consequences for exceeding them, which translated directly into coercive enforcement against individual women. Documented cases include women forced into abortions at eight and a half months pregnant, forced sterilisation of women who already had one child, detention of relatives until a pregnant woman submitted to a procedure, and, in one widely reported case, a father beaten to death by officials because his son was suspected of having fathered a second child.
The policy's demographic effects compounded a pre-existing cultural preference for sons: the gap between mandated family size and desired son-preference produced widespread sex-selective abortion and the abandonment of infant girls, contributing to a generation of "missing women" in China's population structure. China abandoned the policy in 2015, replacing it first with a two-child and later a three-child policy, implicitly acknowledging the demographic damage the original policy had caused — an acknowledgment that came only after 35 years of coercive enforcement.