The persistent mystery of the drop in birth rates has a new possible culprit: the smartphone.
Two new studies — one published this Monday and the other in May — are the first academic works to test whether smartphones may have been one of the causes of this phenomenon.
Caitlin Myers, an economist at Middlebury College, and her student Ezekiel Hooper took advantage of the uneven expansion of the iPhone in the United States to try to isolate the device’s effects on fertility. The first iPhone was released in June 2007 and remained exclusive to AT&T until February 2011. Researchers compared birth rates in counties with near-universal AT&T coverage to those in regions where the carrier had little or no presence.
The study, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, concluded that the iPhone may have been responsible for up to half of the drop in fertility recorded between 2007 and 2011. The strongest effects were seen among young people aged 15 to 24.
One of the hypotheses raised by Myers is that young people began to socialize more via cell phones and less in person, which would have reduced the frequency of sexual relations.
The researcher also suggests that smartphones may have increased access to pornography, leading some young people to replace sex with this type of content. Another possibility is that the devices have facilitated access to information about pregnancy prevention.
Continues after advertising
Falling birth rates, once associated mainly with rich countries, have become an almost global phenomenon. Faced with this widespread trend, researchers began to look for common factors capable of explaining it. The authors of the second study also turned their attention to smartphones.
“Countries with very different healthcare systems, social welfare policies, abortion laws, religious traditions, recessions, and demographic trends saw similar declines over the same period,” wrote the authors, Hernan Moscoso Boedo, an economics professor at the University of Cincinnati, and Nathan Hudson, a doctoral candidate at the institution.
The pair analyzed World Bank data on the spread of smartphones and teenage fertility rates in 128 countries. In nations as diverse as Iran, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Chile, Mexico and Turkey, researchers have found evidence that fertility declines among teenagers accelerated when smartphones became a mass phenomenon.
Continues after advertising
They also tested the technological hypothesis in the United States, using data on access to fixed broadband internet and 4G mobile networks. The result showed that teen fertility rates fell faster in counties with greater access to high-speed internet.
Not all experts, however, are convinced. Theodore Joyce, an economist at Baruch College, said he was skeptical of both studies. According to him, births among teenagers had been falling since the 1990s, long before the popularization of smartphones and new digital technologies.
c.2026 The New York Times Company
