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The Testosterone Threat: Sociobiology, National Security and Population Control

DifferenTakes Series
41 ~ Militarism and National Security
[PDF Version]
By Betsy Hartmann

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Continuing son preference and the widespread practice of sex-selective abortion of female fetuses in India and China are leading to ever more skewed sex ratios in those populations. India’s 2001 census, for example, revealed a shocking decline in child sex ratios in many areas of the country. Overall, there are 927 girls for every thousand boys, but in a number of northern states the figure is much lower. In Delhi, in the first six months of 2005, only 716 girls were born for every 1000 boys.1

Such declining sex ratios are certainly an extremely serious problem with many negative ramifications, especially for women and girls. But do they pose a threat to national and global security?

Betsy Hartmann, director of the Population and Development Program at Hampshire College, is a longstanding activist in the international women’s health movement. She is the author of Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control and a political thriller about the Far Right, The Truth about Fire. She is co-editor with Banu Subramaniam and Charles Zerner of Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties

References

  1. Mohan Rao, “Sex Selective Abortions in India: How Population Policies Make Things Worse,” presented at the conference, “Sex Selection: Technologies, Population and Social Relations,” organized by the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Centre for Women's Development Studies and Action, New Delhi, India, January 23-24, 2006.