Smartphones Reduce Birth Rate [???]
June 10th, 2026Via: AFP:
As governments around the world struggle with ways to reverse plunging birth rates, new US studies suggest they have ignored a key culprit — the smartphone.
“Is the iPhone Birth Control?” asked a paper published Monday by the National Bureau of Economic Research, delving into why US fertility rates have fallen by 22 percent since 2007.
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So Middlebury College economist Caitlin Myers and her student Ezekiel Hooper tested a hypothesis that smartphones — which emerged with the arrival of the first iPhone in 2007 — might have something to do with it.
Until 2011, iPhones were available from a single US cellular network, AT&T, so they compared US counties that had near-universal AT&T coverage with those that had little or none during those years.
And they found that access to the iPhone correlated with reductions in births by 4.5–8.0 percent at ages 15–19 and by 3.2–6.6 percent at ages 20–24.
There were also statistically significant but smaller declines among older women.
While they stress that iPhones are not the “sole cause,” the introduction of the smartphone “played a sizable role in the decline in US births” after 2007 as it shaped people’s behavior with less in-person contact.
“As modern smartphones diffused, time spent with friends in person and sexual activity fell sharply alongside rising consumption of pornography, a possible substitute for partnered sex,” they concluded.
