Contradictions with the One Child Policy

China is large and to my perspective, it feels like the one child policy (OCP) wasn't super consistent across the entire country. It also is doesn't help that the most popular and common media outlets regurgitate news that make it seem like absolutely no one in China during the OCP had anything other than a single son, hammering over and over again the skewed gender ratio.

And yet, when there are birthfamily matches with adoptees, many of them find they have multiple sisters or multiple brothers and sisters and the adoptee may have been the middle child, not the oldest or the youngest. We were told back in the day that girls were being abandoned by the thousands, but then, why the robust human trafficking rings that worked all over China (not just in Guangdong/Hunan) moving babies sometimes 800 miles away that began (according to the Duans in One Child Nation) in 1992 at least the very year international adoption opened? People were both relinquishing and sometimes abandoning their kids, but then there were confiscations of babies by officials, lies told to birthparents to coerce them into giving up their child, and actual kidnappings.

Stories of sex selective abortions reach the media far more often than stories of women being forced to abort or given a choice between being sterilized after giving birth or aborting. Or given no choice at all. I've talked to some so-called "hidden daughters" in China. They say that the OCP was strict and they had to go into hiding, being shuffled around to their distant family members before returning home, and even then having to live with false paperwork, but then being able to buy legitimate paperwork to immigrate to the US, do undergrad schooling in the US, and ultimately work for a tech company with a green card. And that hidden daughter was one of three, and yet the brother and the older sister did not have to go into hiding--even though the One Child Policy says ONE. So why did the middle child have to go into hiding? 

So then people bring up, "oh, well, if you lived in the countryside, you could have more children." Like the Chinese citizen who translated for the adoption agency who went with my parent's adoption group who was one of several children, but who did not live in the countryside and seemed to be  well off and well connected.

So then people say, "oh, well, if the first child was born a girl, you could try for a boy." But then I talked to my coworker who lived under the OCP as a child and said she was the eldest child and that it was her brother who had to go into hiding. 

It's much easier, palatable, and marketable to adopt from China when everyone was neatly "abandoned."

But with most, if not all, orphanages purchasing babies from "finders," matchmakers, traffickers, and other orphanages, how can it not seem like a cruel game for profit.

How can I explain to the people in my life that my orphanage was a primary and secondary buyer of babies coerced from their parents and trafficked, when all the news and movies and documentaries will only ever tell the story of those "willing" abandonments, as if it could ever be willing under duress. How do I explain that the OCP applied to some people sometimes, but then my Chinese international coworkers had a way to skirt around the law, but then some people weren't able to. And adoptees who haven't looked into this continue to share their "story" as they believe it happened based on paperwork that was forged on a massive scale.