If the runts/girls are lucky, they get put up for adoption.

i dont think that's how it works anymore. i think it's more like how much the government will help with so if you decide to have more than one you are one your own and get less money my boyfriend's parents adopted a girl from China. Girls are thrown away there. She's 8 now and really really cute

Sometimes Mom and Dad take unwanted children for a walk in the woods.

This is what Wiki says which is pretty interesting. It really doesn't matter if you have twins or triplets. They are treated as one birth. The one-child policy promotes couples having only one child in rural and urban areas. However, parents of twins, triplets, etc. are given the same benefits as parents of one child.[5] The limit has been strongly enforced in urban areas, but the actual implementation varies from location to location.[6] In most rural areas, families are allowed to have two children if the first child is female or disabled.[7] Second children are subject to birth spacing (usually 3 or 4 years). Additional children will result in large fines: families violating the policy are required to pay monetary penalties and might be denied bonuses at their workplace. Children born in overseas countries are not counted under the policy if they do not obtain Chinese citizenship. Chinese citizens returning from abroad can have a second child. The social fostering or maintenance fee (simplified Chinese: 社会抚养费; traditional Chinese: 社會撫養費; pinyin: shèhuì fúyÇŽng fèi) sometimes called in the West a family planning fine, is collected as a multiple of either the annual disposable income of city dwellers or the annual cash income of peasants as determined each year by the local statistics office. The fine for a child born above the birth quota that year is thus a multiple of, depending upon the locality, either urban resident disposable income or peasant cash income estimated that year by the local statistics. So a fine for a child born ten years ago is based on the income estimate for the year of the child's birth and not of the current year.[9] They also have to pay for both the children to go to school and all the family's health care. Some children who are in one-child families pay less than the children in other families. The one child policy was designed from the outset to be a one generation policy.[10] The one-child policy is now enforced at the provincial level, and enforcement varies; some provinces have relaxed the restrictions. Some provinces and cities such as Beijing permit two "only child" parents to have two children. Henan province, with a population of about 100 million, does not allow this exception. Following the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, a limited exception to the regulations was announced in Sichuan province for parents who had lost children in the earthquake.[11] Similar exceptions have previously been made for parents of severely disabled or deceased children.[12] Moreover, in accordance with PRC's affirmative action policies towards ethnic minorities, all non-Han ethnic groups are subjected to different rules and are usually allowed to have two children in urban areas, and three or four in rural areas; in addition, some couples simply pay a fine, or "social maintenance fee" to have more children.[13] Thus the overall fertility rate of mainland China is, in fact, closer to two children per family than to one child per family (1.8). The steepest drop in fertility occurred in the 1970s before one child per family was implemented in 1979. This is due to the fact that population policies and campaigns have been ongoing in China since the 1950s. During the 1970s, a campaign of 'One is good, two is okay and three is too many' was heavily promoted, and as a result of famines and related hardships from the Cultural Revolution[3] Recently, the policy has changed because the long period of sub-replacement fertility caused population aging and negative population growth in some areas,[14] and improvements in education and the economy have caused more couples to want to have fewer children. In April 2007 a study by the University of California, Irvine, which claimed to be the first systematic study of the policy, found that it had proved "remarkably effective".

According to this article, there has never been a penalty for births of multiples - it was treated as a one-child birth. Apparently, there are a LOT of people trying to get fertility drugs to encourage multiple births to get around the one-child law. The One-Child policy was made into law in 2002. The current birth rate in China is about 1.5 per couple; if the law worked perfectly the rate would be 1.43. Currently the birth rate is 138 boys to every 100 girls; they're trying to crack down on gender-elective abortion to fix that. http://www.reproductiverights.org/ww_asia_1child.html http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article416006.ece http://josieliu.blogspot.com/2007/08/new-law-to-prohibit-sex-selection.html

Apparently there's no penalty and there are nationally supported birth-control options.

This is what I found on it, I hope it helps. The law says that couples are allowed to have one "live-birth" - that usually works out to one child. They can apply to the government for a permit to have more than one child - if they 'prove' they have enough status and finances to support the added child then they can have another one. If both parents have post-graduate degrees they are allowed to have two children. If a man or woman have a child from a previous marriage, they are still allowed to have one child in their new marriage. If their child dies they are permitted to have another child. As for multiple births (twins, triplets, etc) they count as one birth and are accepted. Twins are considered good luck (even the girls). Ethnic minorities (and foreigners) are not required to follow this law... only the Han Chinese. If you know something about the Chinese government you will know that policy is rarely enforced. In many places there are families with more than one child. They pay a token fine. In reality, large fines are rare, but are covered by the state-run media as a propaganda campaign - incentive for people to follow the law. Most of the middle class families I have been in contact have two kids. Almost all of the poor rural families I have been in contact with have more than two kids. (For 5 years I taught in rural and suburban elementary schools) The problem isn't the governments law. The problem is the cultural idea that boys are better. I've heard more than one story of a woman being threatened by her mother in law, that unless she provides a son, her husband will divorce her. (Of course, we all know that it is the men who contribute the Y chromosome... but this doesn't seem to matter). Orphanages raise the children of un-wed mothers as few un-wed mothers have the resources to support themselves, let alone another human. There are also a great deal of older children (boys and girls) whose families couldn't afford them and are forced to give them up - rather than have them starve to death. A number of children are abandoned because they have disabilities that the family doesn't have the resources to deal with. Many families live in absolute poverty, and while the kids (usually girls) aren't given up, they may have had a better life if they were. Married women will generally get the sex of the baby while pregnant... they can then abort it if they don't want it (this is now illegal, but it is still often done for a 'fee' to the doctor). Now that the level of education has raised (and women have more autonomy) the idea of having daughters is becoming more and more accepted, especially in urban areas. It's slow, but it is happening. This is a note to all the people who answered this question (and other similar questions) ... If you want to complain about a country having stifling laws and strange practices, why don't you put down your bag of potato chips, get up off the couch and make a contribution to humanity? No, I don't like China's one-child policy. But I see the desperate situation they saw when the made it (millions of people dying of starvation annually because the population was exponentially bigger than the production – too much competition for limited resources). I see the cultural struggle they have with it. I see the women who sit at the doctors office praying for some kind of divine intervention before going through with an abortion. No issue is ever as simple as you think it is.

Twins are excluded from the rule :)

Twins are OK. However, one of the parents has to leave the country.

one has to be killed.