Birth rates have been plummeting all around the world for quite some time now, and researchers think they might have an explanation: smartphones. Not because they’ve irradiated our reproductive systems or anything dystopian like that. It’s a different kind of dystopian: according to one theory, they fundamentally changed how we socialize. With so many of our interactions happening digitally nowadays, even sex is something we started to do remotely… or maybe even not at all.
The New York Times reports that, according to new research published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, economists Caitlin Myers and Ezekiel Hooper used data from the early days of the iPhone’s slow infiltration of society to test whether smartphones can be linked to America’s fertility decline.
The idea here is that when Apple launched the iPhone in 2007, it was exclusive to AT&T until 2011. That gave researchers a clean and neat starting point, allowing them to compare counties with strong AT&T coverage to those without. They concluded that the iPhone may have accounted for up to half of the US fertility decline between 2007 and 2011, with the sharpest effects happening among people ages 15 to 24.
The iPhone didn’t fry our genitals. Instead, it radically changed our behavior. Younger people are socializing more online and not so much in person. Porn suddenly became portable. Information about contraception and abortion was now suddenly in your pocket 24/7. All this started a chain reaction that eventually led to fewer pregnancies overall, with a particular emphasis on fewer accidental pregnancies.
Have Smartphones Become a Substitute for Sex?
As the researchers explain it, smartphones started acting as a substitute for in-person interaction, and in some cases started becoming a substitute for sex itself.
The Times also points out a second recently released study out of the University of Cincinnati, which looked at the same problem but from a global perspective. It examined 128 countries and found a similar pattern: once smartphones started to become a thing in 2007, teen fertility rates started spiraling downward, no matter the culture, the country, or the political system.
I would argue that’s ultimately a good thing, and maybe our global concept of normal birth rates was perhaps hinging a little too hard on accidental teen pregnancies. Regardless, the common thread here is that the convenience of the smartphone may be directly linked to the decline in birth rates, though not everyone is convinced.
Some experts quoted in the piece argue that teen birth rates were already falling in the 1990s, and overall warn against blaming a single object for such dramatic demographic shifts. And that very well could be true; after all, there was a large, nationwide shift toward preventing teen pregnancies in the 1990s. Perhaps that trend got a major boost when the information being disseminated by the movement suddenly became readily available for everyone to access at all hours of the day.
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