As governments around the world struggle to find ways to reverse the drastic decline in birth rates, new studies suggest they have overlooked a key culprit: the smartphone.
“Is the iPhone a contraceptive?” asked an article published on Monday by the National Bureau of Economic Research, which analyzes the 22% drop in fertility in the United States since 2007.
Middlebury College economist Caitlin Myers and her student Ezekiel Hooper tested the hypothesis that smartphones — which emerged with the first iPhone in 2007 — might have something to do with it.
Until 2011, iPhones were available on only one US wireless network, AT&T, so they compared US counties that had AT&T coverage to those that had little or none during those years.
They found that iPhone access was correlated with reductions in births of between 4.5 and 8.0% in women aged 15 to 19 and between 3.2 and 6.6% in those aged 20 to 24..
There were also statistically significant, although smaller, declines among older women.
Although they emphasize that iPhones are not the “only cause,” The smartphone “played a considerable role in the decline in births in the United States” after 2007.
“As modern smartphones became more widespread, time spent with friends in person and sexual activity plummeted along with increasing consumption of pornography, a potential substitute for partnered sex,” they concluded.
Other research published in May by University of Cincinnati economists Nathan Hudson and Hernan Moscoso Boedo found evidence of similar trends since 2007.
They analyzed World Bank data measuring smartphone penetration and teenage fertility rates in 128 countries.
They found that the decline in birth rates accelerated once smartphones became widely availablea phenomenon that was observed in countries “with fundamentally different health systems, welfare, economic and cultural environments.”
This, they concluded, points to “a common global technological shock.”
Some academics remain skeptical.
For example, teen births in the United States have been declining since the early 1990s, long before the smartphone.