Could the iPhone be to blame for America’s plunging birth rate?

There have been several theories proposed as to why birth rates are falling so rapidly around the world, from the cost of living, to female education, to anxieties about the future. But, per a recent study, there might be an even simpler explanation: it’s because you’re always on that damn phone.

This week, at the same time that Apple announced plans to bring new life to its smartphone models with, you guessed it, AI, a working paper has been published that links the launch of the tech giant’s most valuable product to lower fertility rates in the US, particularly among young adults and teens.

Conceive Different

In the study, researchers presented data from the introduction of the iPhone back in 2007, when it was made exclusively available on AT&T’s network, until 2011. By comparing birth-rate changes between those years in US counties with AT&T broadband access versus those that had little or no coverage, the paper postulates that the iPhone’s diffusion may have caused as much as half of the fertility decline in covered areas in that time frame.

The declines were especially pronounced across younger age groups, with implied reductions in births of up to 8% for the cohort aged 15-19 and 6.6% for ages 20-29. Zooming out a little, evidence for the iPhone’s impact also broadly tracks with historical US birth data from the National Center for Health Statistics across age groups.

Overall, the US general fertility rate has fallen some 23% since 2007 to just 53.1 births per 1,000 females aged 15 to 44 in 2025, per provisional figures in the latest NCHS release. In parallel, birth rates have declined significantly since the first iPhone rollout for American females aged 15 to 19 (down 72%), 20 to 24 (down 50%), and 25 to 29 (down 28%). Birth rates among those aged 30 to 34, meanwhile, stayed relatively level, and rates for cohorts aged 35 and older have all ticked up.

Rearing-ender?

Though its hypothesis is speculative, the paper suggests various social factors that have been compounded by the rise of smartphones as contributing to a “sustained decline” in births that’s “not readily explained by economic conditions, contraceptive use, housing or childcare costs.” Indeed, results from national surveys on sexual behaviour and time use are found to be “consistent with the iPhone reducing in-person interactions, increasing pornography use, and reducing sexual frequency.”