Posted on 06/08/2026 6:02:55 PM PDT by canuck_conservative
The paper, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, notes that the fertility rate in the U.S. has fallen by 22 per cent since 2007, when the first iPhone went on sale in the country...
Until 2011, the iPhone was only available in the U.S. to subscribers of AT&T, allowing the researchers to compare birth rates in counties with near-universal AT&T coverage to counties with little or none in the four years since the first iPhone’s release.
Their findings suggest a striking relationship between iPhone access and declining birth rates...
As for why exactly this is, the researchers present three candidates. iPhone use reduces in-person interactions, provides more access to information about contraception and abortion, and provides more access to pornography.
Essentially, the smartphone is an unofficial form of contraceptive...
Another study, published in the scientific journal Child Development, found that fewer adolescents in recent years engaged in adult activities such as having sex, dating, drinking alcohol, working for pay, going out without their parents, and driving, and suggested a link to increased Internet use...
(Excerpt) Read more at theprovince.com ...
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"Technology that's supposed to make our lives better, but makes them worse ..."
Did anyone ever think that maybe folks are doing a little better at planning. Why not look into the contraceptives available...and purchased. Like....duh...
Plug into The Matrix.....
"When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it.
Constant conjunction is not causality. What type of people are most likely to buy an iPhone? If you say liberal affluent professionals, well, there you go.
Don’t blame the phone. Blame the person holding it.
If they look like your Momz I think I see the problem.😂
Oh good grief.
There was plenty of information about, and availability to, contraception AND pornography before iPhones came along.
If young people don’t want to take on the responsibilities of having children, I doubt it has much to do with technology.
Party Pooper. 😉👍
I watch the bodycam YouTubes and these people are being slammed around and cuffed but they don’t let go of the phone.
Android and Kindle started 2007 as well...
It’s not cell phones..it’s the liberal mindset. Hard to be fertile if you don’t know what sex you are.
And then the simple vibrator evolved...
My stock-in-trade, when it comes to some of the fruitcake ideas posted here.
We did fine for thousands of years, without vibrators...
Mobile phones are just one factor. I believe the emergence of 24-hour news coverage has done more to discourage reproduction, giving the last generation a sense of futility and inevitable doom with it’s overwhelming glut of negative information.
Other factors are media overload, loss of community (church and other activities), unreasonable expectations (Disney Princess Syndrome) and internet pornography.
Carry on FRiend. 👍
They are implying all “smartphones”...so Android users affected too supposedly (their paper is still in the “working” stage and has zero tech facts so far). As you mentioned “conjunction is not causality”. I think they are going for a “screen time” type thing rather than a “RF emission” type thing. They are speculating like anyone can do...maybe it is the rise of streaming video services? Or the rise of video games? Or the rise of ?
Let me the first to say that correlation is not causation.
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