Smartphones blamed for decline in fertility rate among women in new study

The latest smartphone feature? Making it harder to have kids.Data from the CDC shows that the birth rate has been declining steadily since 2007.In 2025, about 53 babies were born for every 1,000 women aged 15–44 — an all-time low.Now a new study is putting much of the blame on the rise of smartphone use, finding that as much as half of the decline can be pinned on the proliferation of the iPhone.Researchers at Middlebury College looked at data from June 2007 to February 2011, during which the first smartphone, the iPhone, was released and only sold through AT&T.What they found was that iPhones substantially deepened the decline of births.

The association isn’t small, either: The authors said smartphone use “explains 33–52% of the decline in the general fertility rate among women aged 15–44.”But why did getting an iPhone stop people from having as many babies?The authors point to several likely culprits: fewer in-person interactions, more porn use and less frequent sex.Dr.Jaime Knopman, a reproductive endocrinologist who was not involved with the research, said that she’s not surprised.“This study demonstrated that smartphones are impacting our fertility not because they are frying our eggs or damaging our reproductive organs (phew) but because they are changing our behavior,” she told The Post.“Young people spend less time interacting with each other in person which has translated into having less sex and therefore fewer children.

We date in different ways, we meet in different ways and much of this is attributed to living in an online world all the time.“While technology has made communication make the world smaller, it has also created distance reducing in-person interactions that are essential for building relationships and fostering intimacy.”A survey from 2019 showed that about a third of adults use technology in every night or almost every night.Nearly 25% of participants felt like their partner’s use of technology in bed int...