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.
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, fewer pregnancies. Other economists have declared her findings likely – and a cursory glance at posts shared by single people on social media also seemingly concurs.
“Spent the last 30 minutes scrolling on TikTok on the toilet, completely forgot I was on a date and he was waiting for me at the table,” one user shared. Another admitted that she’d love to have a meet-cute like those she sees in rom-coms but knows it’s impossible as she spends all of her time scrolling, “ignoring everything and putting zero effort into dating”.
Notably, a recent YouGov survey found that the UK is in the midst of a “kissing recession”, in which more than a third of UK adults (35 per cent) said they kiss someone romantically less often than they did five years ago. Meanwhile, nearly one in five respondents (19 per cent) said they hadn’t kissed anyone romantically in over a year.
Even pre-pandemic, a 2019 national survey of sexual attitudes and lifestyles found that sex was on the decline in Britain, with the steepest drop among the over-25s and those who are married or cohabiting. Professor Kaye Wellings and the team who conducted the research pointed to the introduction of the iPhone as a key impact.
“I can see that the boundary between the public world and private life is getting weaker. It’s porous,” Wellings told The Guardian at the time. “You get home and continue working, or continue shopping or buy tickets – everything except for … talking. You don’t feel close when you are constantly on the phone.”
In May, a second academic study analysed the impact of smartphones. Hernan Moscoso Boedo, an economics professor at the University of Cincinnati and Nathan Hudson, a PhD. student analysed World Bank data measuring smartphone prevalence and teenage fertility rates in 128 countries. They found fertility rates declined once smartphones became widespread in countries as varied as Iran, Costa Rica, Turkey and Mexico.
To test their technology theory in the US, Boedo and Hudson used data on wired broadband access and 4G high-speed networks and found that fertility rates for teenagers similarly declined fastest in countries with more high-speed access to the internet.
Kevin McEleny, consultant neurologist at Newcastle Fertility Centre and chair of the British Fertility Society, says these findings aren’t “necessarily” applicable to the UK – and should be taken with a pinch of salt at large. “It’s an interesting theory,” he muses. “But maybe if you did the same thing looking at PlayStation, you might find the same results.”
McEleny adds: “Whilst there might be something in it, we’ve had a decline [in birth rates] in the Western World for years and years – that predated the introduction of iPhones. There are perhaps more pertinent problems. I think economics is probably the major issue. We’ve had a reduction in IVF funding in the NHS; people can’t get access to the treatment they require or afford families, so are choosing not to have children. There are a number of reasons.”