Did the iPhone stop us having babies? New research suggests so

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Phones – and how we use them – can be blamed for a lot of things: short attention spans, bad posture, loneliness, that weird bump in our pinky fingers… But researchers have now posited that the modern smartphone can be blamed for something far scarier for our futures: the dwindling birth rate.

When I first heard this, I protectively put my hand to my stomach: there’s long been a persistent theory that you can fry your eggs (and sperm) by using a mobile phone. This isn’t, thankfully, what scientists meant – it’s the solitude that scrolling gives rise to that could potentially be leading to a decline in procreation, rather than some kind of terrifying zapping.

The original iPhone, the first modern smartphone, was rolled out in the US in 2007. In the four years following, general fertility in the US fell by 22 per cent. In one study, conducted by the National Bureau of Economic Research, researchers found that the commonly explored reasons for people having fewer (or no) children – recessions, expensive housing, childcare costs, changes in birth control use – still didn’t fully explain the drastic decline.

So, Caitlin Myers, an economist at Middlebury College and her student Ezekiel Hooper looked at technology. Myers realised that when iPhones were initially released, they only worked in the US on the AT&T network – and in some areas far better than others.

This postcode lottery could, therefore, be used to compare the device’s impact on fertility. Their paper found that the iPhone caused as much as half of the fertility decline in the US between 2007 and 2011, most significantly among young people aged between 15 and 24.

The study posits that we started to spend less time with friends and potential partners and more time with our beloved devices (Warner Bros)

Myers theorised that people with phones spent more time online and less time socialising in person, which consequently led to greater pornography consumption, less dating, less sex and, therefore,…

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