Smartphones Might Be Playing a Role in the United States’ Declining Birth Rate, New Research Suggests

Some economists suspect that the technology’s widespread adoption has reduced in-person interactions and increased access to pornography and information on birth control, leading to less unprotected sex

Margherita Bassi

| Daily Correspondent

July 16, 2026 12:05 p.m.

The birth rate in the United States has been steadily falling for nearly two decades. Since 2007, it has decreased almost every year, leading to a 22 percent decline. Now, new research hints that this timing isn’t a coincidence. The downward trend began right after Apple released the iPhone—the first modern smartphone—which revolutionized the tech industry.

In a working paper shared in June by the National Bureau of Economic Research, two researchers found an association between the iPhone’s introduction and a decline in birth rate, marking the technology as a major reason why Americans are now having fewer babies. The study, which has not been peer-reviewed, is one of the first to look at the potential link.

Researchers and policymakers initially assumed that the drop in birth rate was due to the Great Recession, which took place from late 2007 to mid-2009, study co-author Caitlin Myers, an economist at Middlebury College, tells CNN’s Deidre McPhillips. “Births have long been known to be pro-cyclical, and so the conventional wisdom was they’ll come back up.”

“Then, we had a baby-less recovery,” she says.

To investigate other reasons, Myers and economist Ezekiel Hooper, who was formerly at Middlebury and is Myers’ stepson, turned to the introduction of the iPhone, which led to a widespread cultural shift in the U.S. From June 2007 through February 2011, AT&T was the only phone carrier that provided the smartphone. So, the team looked at birth rates in census blocks with different AT&T mobile broadband coverage within that time frame.

Comparing blocks where more than 90 percent of residents lived in AT&T’s coverage area with those where less than 10 percent lived in the coverage area allowed the team to make some inferences. In locations with early access to iPhones, the birth rate fell by 4.5 to 8.0 percent among 15- to 19-year-olds and by 3.2 to 6.6 percent among 20- to 24-year-olds, analyses revealed. It dropped by a smaller amount among older groups. The findings remained consistent even after controlling for other factors that could affect smartphone use, like wealth and whether the area was urban or rural.

Overall, iPhones might account for 33 to 52 percent of the birth rate decline in individuals ages 15 to 44 between 2007 and 2011, according to the researchers.

“What you can see in this simplest of comparisons [is that] births start to fall in the places where you can get one, and they’re not falling nearly as much in the places where you can’t,” Myers tells Scott Horsley on NPR’s “All Things Considered.”

How could iPhones have played a role in fewer babies? The researchers suggest that the tech may have led to fewer in-person interactions as well as more access to pornography and information on birth control. All three shifts can result in less unprotected sex and are trends seen in national survey data.

The findings don’t mean iPhones are solely responsible for the decline in birth rate, Myers tells CBS News’ Aimee Picchi. Instead, they mean that the technology is “a really important factor to consider.”

What’s more, another study, published in May in the journal Social Science Research Network, suggests that smartphones changed how teens spend time with one another, causing teen fertility to plummet.

“The smartphone fundamentally changed the way adolescents spent their time outside of school,” Jean Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University who was not involved in either study, tells NPR. “They started spending a lot more time online and on their phones and a lot less time hanging out with their friends in person and driving around in a car or going to the mall or just hanging out.”

While Twenge finds the results of Myers and Hooper’s study plausible, neither piece of new research has convinced Baruch College economist Theodore Joyce, per the New York Times’ Sabrina Tavernise. He points out that teen births have been declining since the 1990s, and that the recent studies investigated only a brief time before smartphones became truly ubiquitous.

The hypothesis of iPhones’ role in the declining birth rate, Joyce says, therefore “remains speculative.”