Is the iPhone deepening America’s fertility decline?

https://www.christianpost.com/news/is-the-iphone-deepening-americas-fertility-decline.html

Publish Date: 2026-06-10 16:17:00

By Samantha Kamman, Christian Post Reporter Wednesday, June 10, 2026Unsplash/Daniel Romero

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…

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