In case you needed another reason to distance yourself from your smartphone: It may lead to the eventual extinction of the human species.
The plummeting birthrate is an arresting metric, and often seems like a stand-in for society’s ills. Nearly 710,000 fewer babies were born in the United States in 2025 than in 2007, and even fewer are predicted for 2026. Increases in women’s education, the high cost of child care and even narcissism have been named as contributing factors, but nothing yet has — or perhaps can — fully explain the decline.
It’s tempting to hunt for an archcause to explain it all — if a single culprit can be identified, perhaps a single solution can be too. But in the search for a magic bullet, we risk ignoring less obvious but more viable solutions. Or oversimplifying the problem to the point that we overlook the more nuanced factors at play.
A working paper published in the National Bureau of Economic Research this month seemed like the most promising single-factor explanation yet: “Is the iPhone Birth Control? Causal Evidence From AT&T’s 2007-2011 Carrier Monopoly” uses a natural experiment to correlate fertility decline with smartphone use. When Apple first rolled out the iPhone in June 2007, it was available only on AT&T’s network. The researchers mapped the geographic rollout of the phone between June 2007 and February 2011 (when AT&T stopped being the exclusive carrier) to compare fertility rates in those parts of the United States with and without the mobile phones.
“Overall,” the authors found, “the diffusion of the iPhone explains 33-52 percent of the decline in the general fertility rate among women aged 15-44,” with the greatest decreases concentrated among teenagers and young adults from ages 15 to 24.
Another paper, published in May, found similarly robust results. The authors, the economists Nathan Hudson and Hernan Moscoso Boedo of the University of Cincinnati, also cross-referenced mobile coverage maps with fertility rates across the United States and replicated the results in a parallel study in Britain: In their study, teenage fertility rates in particular collapsed as smartphones reached saturation.
The problem isn’t the papers themselves — both note that the smartphone should be considered as accelerants of a pre-existing decline, rather than the sole cause. Instead, it’s in the eager interpretation of those results, which often lends the impression that a mystery — the elusive single source of declining birthrates — has been solved.
Low fertility rates are a lagging indicator, the latest outcome of a string of social shifts that have already embedded themselves in our lives. Stopping at “it’s the phones!” can leave the many underlying issues — economic precarity, atrophied social skills, increasing isolation and anxiety — unaddressed.
Worried parties would be better served by focusing on factors further up the chain: the in-person interactions that lead to relationships, which then might lead to sex and only then, potentially, to births. A nuanced exploration of that mechanism might reveal other, deeper problems — and possibly more solutions.
Mr. Hudson and Mr. Moscoso Boedo explain the phone-to-fallowness connection this way: “Once enough teens are on the phone, being on the phone is where the peer network is; in-person time falls sharply, and with it the unstructured contact in which most unintended teen conceptions occur.” Most would — and should — consider a drop in teen births to be a positive development. But, as the researchers ominously note, “the same instrument that produces a collapse in teen fertility produces a surge in teen suicides.”
Looked at more closely, the fertility crisis appears to be a crisis of connection. And smartphones compound it via a substitution effect, encouraging the move from a real-world context to a phone-mediated one.
Texting and video calls — simulacra of in-person conversation — reduce the need to meet in real life. On-screen entertainments — gambling, gaming, apps exquisitely engineered to hook users via intermittent reinforcement — distract from the slower, more effortful pleasures of connecting with other humans. Pornography can lower the desire for in-person sexual activity. And social media supercharges it all, with endless streams of anxiety-inducing and gender-polarizing content.
An increase in fertility rates could be positive for any number of reasons, from economic dynamism to individual fulfillment. But equally or more important might be an increase in civic health, or a decrease in isolation.
All of the above are less likely to result from hand-wringing about iPhones as contraception than from asking more nuanced questions: What parts of human life have we, intentionally or not, allowed technology to displace? And how can those things be restored?
The answer might still be to throw our phones into the sea — but not just to juice fertility.
Christine Emba is the author of “Rethinking Sex: A Provocation” and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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