The iPhone may have played a role in the falling birth rates in the United States by changing how young people socialize, form relationships and spend their time, new research suggests.
Researchers Caitlin Myers and Ezekiel Hooper of Middlebury College in Vermont analyzed the connection between the smartphone’s 2007 release and the overall decrease in fertility since then in a paper published this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The research has not yet been independently reviewed.
“The U.S. general fertility rate has fallen by 22% since 2007, a sustained decline not readily explained by economic conditions, contraceptive use, housing or childcare costs, or other commonly cited factors,” Myers and Hooper wrote. “We assess the potential role of a different shock: the diffusion of the smartphone.”
The first iPhone was rolled out in 2007, and the researchers noted that their study uses that timeframe as “a natural experiment,” drawing on data from 2007 through 2011, when iPhones were sold only on AT&T.
“From June 2007 through February 2011, the device was sold only on AT&T, allowing us to identify its effect from variation in AT&T’s mobile broadband coverage,” the study states. “Entropy-balanced Poisson and synthetic difference-in-differences event studies imply that access to the iPhone reduced births by 4.5–8.0% at ages 15–19 and 3.2–6.6% at ages 20–24, with statistically significant but smaller declines among older cohorts.”
The researchers also applied placebo analyses to Sprint and Verizon pre-2011 coverage but found no correlation.
Myers and Hooper argue that, taken together, “these cohort effects imply that the diffusion of the iPhone deepened the decline in births among women under 30 while suppressing the rise in births among older women.”
“Overall, the diffusion of the iPhone explains 33–52% of the decline in the general fertility rate among women aged 15–44,” the researchers continued. “National-survey evidence on time use and sexual behavior is consistent with the iPhone reducing in-person interactions, increasing pornography use and reducing sexual frequency.”
Apple did not immediately respond to The Christian Post’s request for comment about the research.
Another study published in May by two University of Cincinnati professors, titled “The Collapse of Teen Fertility in the Digital Era,” asserts that teen fertility “collapsed globally” starting around 2007, the same year the iPhone was released.
The study’s abstract argues that “smartphones changed how teens spend time with each other, and that this change in turn drove the collapse in teen fertility.”
“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,” the study authors argue. “A coordination model formalizes this tipping: as the smartphone price falls, the in-person equilibrium ceases to exist and the economy moves to a phone-mediated one.”
According to the researchers, the drop in teen fertility affected countries “across the income and policy spectrum.” Researchers used data from the U.S., England and Wales, “recovering the same acceleration and the same effect of mobile coverage on teen conceptions” and “ruling out country-specific contraceptive-access and welfare-reform stories.”
Data released earlier this year by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, published in the Vital Statistics Surveillance Report, show that the provisional number of births in the United States in 2025 was just over 3.6 million. The report notes that this represents a 1% decline from 2024.
The general fertility rate was 53.1 births per 1,000 females ages 15-44, a figure that some have noted is equivalent to 1.57 births per woman and is significantly below the 2.1 “replacement rate.”
Samantha Kamman is a reporter for The Christian Post. She can be reached at: [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter: @Samantha_Kamman
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