From Newsgroup: sci.misc

From the -2too busy doomscrolling-+ department:
Feed: Slashdot
Title: Study Links Smartphones With Declining Fertility Rates
Author: BeauHD
Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2026 23:00:00 +0000
Link: https://apple.slashdot.org/story/26/06/11/2044208/study-links-smartphones-with-declining-fertility-rates?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed

Two recent studies argue that smartphones may have contributed to
falling birthrates by reducing in-person social interaction, sexual
frequency, and other conditions tied to unintended pregnancies. "One of
the studies published in May is called 'The Collapse of Teen Fertility
in the Digital Era' and the other, published just Monday, is titled 'Is
the iPhone Birth Control? Causal Evidence from AT&T's 2007-2011 Carrier Monopoly,'" reports KTLA. "Both were chronicled in a New York Times
piece by political writer Sabrina Tavernise on Monday." Slashdot reader
sabbede submitted the story. From the report: The one from May, authored
by two University of Cincinnati professors, posits that teen fertility "collapsed globally" starting around 2007 -- the same year the first
iPhone was released. "Smart phones changed how teens spend time with
each other ... this change in turn drove the collapse in teen
fertility," the study's abstract reads. "Once enough teens are on the
phone, being on the phone is where the peer network is; in-person time
falls sharply, and with it the unstructured contact in which most
unintended teen conceptions occur." The study claimed that countries
"across the income and policy spectrum" were affected by the teen
fertility drop, and that researchers used data from multiple countries, including the U.S., England and Wales, to rule out "country-specific contraceptive access and welfare reform stories." "This model predicts
that the shift towards the phone-mediated equilibrium affects multiple
aspects of teen behavior," the abstract continues, concluding that "the
same instrument that produces a collapse in teen fertility produces a
surge in teen suicides." The study published on Monday looks more
closely at the United States, explaining that nationwide general
fertility rates have fallen 22% since 2007. "[This is] a sustained
decline not readily explained by economic conditions, contraceptive use, housing or childcare costs, or other commonly cited factors," the
National Bureau of Economic Researchers study states. "We assess the
potential role of a different shock: the diffusion of the smartphone."
As mentioned before, the first iPhone was rolled out in 2007, and this
study makes use of that timeframe as "a natural experiment" by using
data from 2007 through 2011, when iPhones were only sold 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 says. "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. Placebo analyses applied to Verizon and Sprint's pre-2011
coverage footprint are null. 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
the general fertility rate among women aged 15-44," researchers
continued. "National-survey evidence on time use and sexual behavior is consistent with the iPhone reducing in-person interactions, increasing pornography use and reducing sexual frequency."

[image 1 (link #2)][1] [image 2 (link #4)][3]

Read more of this story[5] at Slashdot.

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[5]: https://apple.slashdot.org/story/26/06/11/2044208/study-links-smartphones-with-declining-fertility-rates?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed (link)
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