The Smartphone Theory of Birth Rate Decline Doesn't Hold Up

Fertility rates started falling centuries before the iPhone was introduced.

Just when you think smartphone panic can't get any more dumb, it always does. Case in point: People are insisting that phones are why people worldwide are having fewer kids.

There's one very simple, very obvious flaw with this theory: Fertility rates have been falling for hundreds of years.

History Time!

In the U.S., the total fertility rate—that is, the average number of kids a woman in a given time period will have in her lifetime—has been falling since the U.S. founding. (Cue panic: Is democracy to blame for declining birth rates???)

In 1800, the fertility rate for white American women was 7.04. By 1850 it had dropped to 5.42, and by 1900 it was 3.56. For black women, the fertility rate in the 1850s (the earliest period for which we have data) was 7.9; by 1900 it was 5.61.

By 1930, the U.S. fertility rate had fallen below 3 for both white (2.45) and black (2.98) women, and the decline continued into the 1940s.

Fertility trend lines have not always been a linear decrease. By 1960, fertility rates had ticked up again, reaching 3.53 for white women and 4.52 for black women.

Then they once again tumbled, reaching just 1.74 in 1976.

The fertility rate continued to hover below 2 until 1989, after which it bounced back and forth between just under and just over 2 for a couple decades. It fell to 1.97 again in the 1995–1997 period, then saw small but sustained increases from 2002 (fertility rate 2.02) through 2007 (2.11).

Then it started falling again, going back down to 2 by 2009. It has mostly declined modestly but consistently since then, reaching 1.89 in 2011, 1.76 in 2017, 1.66 in 2021, and 1.62 in 2024.

It's this post-2007 fall that has the technology alarmists going off. Don't you know the iPhone was introduced in 2007?

Moral Panic Alert

In a new piece for the Financial Times, John Burn-Murdoch—author of a criminally misleading and data-torturing article about conscientiousness last year—suggests that "the most recent [birth rate] plunge appears connected with our use of technology." He notes that in the past 15 years, birth rates have been falling "across different cultures and levels of economic development." And what unites all these disparate countries? The use of smartphones, of course.

It sounds so obvious! That is, until you consider the other things that have united many countries over the last few decades.

A giant decline in child mortality. (People have fewer kids when they're less worried that several will die.) Rising housing costs. A big financial crisis. Rising material wealth nonetheless. Rising expectations about the levels of comfort and adult supervision that kids must have. A global pandemic. Globalized media and culture. Increased access to contraception and abortion.

And, of course, better economic options for women and less stigma around remaining unmarried, making it economically and culturally unnecessary for women to marry and have kids. This goes in hand with Increasing educational opportunities for women and other factors leading to later marriages and, in turn, later childbearing.

To suggest that smartphones are driving the trend in fewer births is to ignore these myriad other potential causes in favor of a simple, sensational, and ideologically motivated narrative. It's the epitome of moral panic—honing in on one correlation (birth rates have fallen since the smartphone was introduced) while ignoring the larger context (birth rates have been falling since long before its introduction) and other potential explanations (feminism, economics, etc.) in order to push an attention-getting and easy-to-understand narrative that aligns with prevailing political priorities and scapegoats.

Going out on a limb here, but I don't think the phones did it. pic.twitter.com/zwkSMZNusd

— The Alex Nowrasteh (@AlexNowrasteh) May 17, 2026

4G Connectivity

In his case against smartphones, Burns-Murdoch points to a paper from Nathan Hudson and Hernan Moscoso-Boedo at the University of Cincinnati. It found "the number of births fell first and fastest in the areas that received high-speed mobile connectivity earliest," Burns-Murdoch writes.

This is one of those points that might seem damning—until you think about it for two seconds. What sorts of areas were more likely to get connectivity early? Densely populated metropolitan areas, where residents are more likely to be culturally liberal, where young people with big professional ambitions are more likely to move, and so on. Places that got connectivity later are going to be more isolated and less densely populated areas, which tend to be more conservative and likely to be hubs of economic opportunity.

It could be the phones—or it could be the entirely different set of social, economic, and political circumstances between places that would have had early 4G connectivity and those that wouldn't.

Besides, while Burn-Murdoch suggests that the study found this 4G/fertility-drop link for birth rates generally, the authors of the study directly contradict the idea that smartphones are the main culprit for fertility declines beyond teenagers.

"Whatever the smartphone shock is doing to fertility, it is doing to teens," they write. "The entire 25+ population, which accounts for roughly 80 percent of women of reproductive age in these countries, exhibits no detrended response in the typical country."

Bye, Teen Moms!

The 4G study brings us to another important point: One of the biggest factors driving a decline in fertility rates in the U.S. is a decline in teen pregnancies.

We've gone from more than 80 births per 1,000 girls aged 15 to 19 in 1950 to just under 50 births per 1,000 in 2000 to just 12.7 births per 1,000 in 2024.

The drastic decline in teen births is something to be celebrated. But it does mean fewer births generally.

We've simultaneously seen a big rise in births to women in their late 30s and early 40s. Demographically speaking, this cannot make up for the dearth of teen moms. But it's an important reminder that for a lot of women, motherhood isn't being rejected, just pushed back. And while Americans are having fewer kids, the ones they do have are on average more wanted and more likely to be raised in a stable and financially sufficient environment.

If the smartphones-did-it theory of fertility rate decline turns out to have some merit because high-school sophomores are too online to be having unsafe sex, that's not exactly the kind of thing I think we should lose sleep over. If the iPhone means fewer unplanned pregnancies among people not old enough to vote, well… good.

I prefer this version xD pic.twitter.com/6dqmtlSyOQ

— Θωμᾶς del Vasto (@Thomasdelvasto_) May 17, 2026

The Mexican Example

Historically, fertility rates have fallen as countries get richer. Burn-Murdoch suggests that that can't explain our current predicament, pointing out that Mexico now has a lower birth rate than the U.S. 

But this decline not only started before smartphones were introduced; it has coincided with a drastic increase in Mexico's GDP, especially in recent years. At the same time, feminism—legally and culturally—has been ascendant there too. 

Access to abortion in Mexico has also changed drastically in recent decades, with Mexico City decriminalizing first-trimester abortion in 2007 (while it remained illegal in most of the country) and more areas only starting to do so around 2019.

The Marriage Correlation

Burns-Murdoch goes on to suggest that the main reason we have fewer children is that  we have fewer couples. Many have latched onto this to make a case against phones. The theory goes something like this: Smartphones mean less imperative to date, less dating means less marriage, and fewer marriages means fewer babies.

Again, I must note that there are a whole lot of things other than "too busy on TikTok to date" that can explain declining marriage rates. But there's also no reason to assume that the correlation between fewer kids and fewer marriages goes the way that Burns-Mudroch suggests.

As Stephanie Murray has pointed out, a big driver of marriage is a desire to have kids. Conversely, people who don't want children are likely disincentivized to marry. Dwindling desire for children or a decline in the economic and social imperative to do so could be driving marriage rate declines rather than the other way around.

When It All Comes Back to Feminism  

Even when Burns-Murdoch explores broader cultural explanations for fertility rate decline, he also blames smartphones. For instance, while noting that women's rising expectations for relationships could contribute, he suggests that smartphones made it easier to access ideas that helped fuel this phenomenon.

OK. That seems plausible enough.

But if the argument here is that birth rates are down because smartphones let women access information and cultural ideas that convinced them to dream bigger, demand better treatment, etc., that's a rather circuitous way to assign blame to technology. It's like saying "pharmacies let women access birth control pills, therefore drug stores are the cause of birth rate declines."

It also falls into the same category of complaint as "phones led to fewer teen girls having risky sex and unintended pregnancies." Arguing that smartphones caused these things and therefore smartphones are bad starts to seem like a socially acceptable way of saying women's rights and declines in teen births need to be rolled back.

Fewer teen pregnancies, fewer women feeling like they have no choice but to marry and reproduce with people whom they find undesirable, and fewer women feeling trapped into marriage and motherhood may be phenomena aided by smartphones. But if that's the case, good for smartphones!

---

In the News

Remote prescribing and mailing of abortion pills remains legal, for now. The U.S. Supreme Court weighed in last Thursday, pausing a 5th Circuit ruling that banned both things as the appeals court considered the case. (More details on that case here.) The order comes in the form of an emergency stay, as requested by two abortion pill manufacturers. Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented.

"Here's what happens now: the case goes back to the Fifth Circuit to be decided on the merits," explains Jessica Valenti. "The stay holds through that process—meaning that mifepristone will continue to be available as it is now. But it's almost certain that this case is going to end up back at the Supreme Court. Several abortion rights leaders tell me they see this as SCOTUS' way of delaying that inevitability for as long as possible. Or at least until after the midterms."

---

Read This Thread

The Comstock Act is back! (guh)The right has been aching to resurrect the zombified laws prohibiting mailing of "obscene" or "immoral" materials (sex toys! contraceptives! LGTBQ+ books!)Glad this was only a dissent, but not thrilled to see it rear its head at SCOTUS.

— Mike Stabile (@mikestabile.bsky.social) 2026-05-14T22:38:57.037Z

---

On Substack 

The "vibesession" wasn't caused by social media. "The Biden economy was largely defined by a divergence between consumer sentiment and traditional economic indicators," sometimes referred to as the "vibecession," notes Lakshya Jain at The Argument. And this vibesession, many argued, was being driven by TikTok and other media. But research conducted by The Argument suggests this wasn't true:

At The Argument, we've been tracking both media consumption and voter sentiment for the last nine months. With more than 15,000 individual poll responses from voters across America, we were able to assemble incredibly detailed pictures of platform-level ideologies and sentiment across a host of different issues.

In all of that data, I have yet to see anything indicating that the vibecession is—or was—a TikTok-driven phenomenon.

In our March survey, we actually asked people a battery of questions about how they viewed the economy today compared to 25 years ago. When it came to quality of life indicators like "taking a vacation," "buying a house," or "raising children," virtually everyone agreed that the economy is worse today than it was in 2001.

Here's the interesting part, though: The least pessimistic groups were the voters who got their news from social media and cable television. In every single question, those who consumed information from TikTok, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), or cable television were actually slightly more optimistic than other voters were.

---

More Sex & Tech 

Don't call it age verification. Call it centralised personal data collection. And understand that it serves surveillance, not safety for children.

— Tuta (@TutaPrivacy) May 17, 2026

• An Oklahoma bill that would have raised the minimum age for strippers to 21 has failed.

• A bill in North Carolina would assess a $10 tax on anyone entering a strip club.

Comments

[mtrueman]

"Then they once again tumbled, reaching just 1.74 in 1976"

Not so impressive. Among the Comanche, fertility rates were so low the tribe took to kidnapping children of pioneers and settlers to keep their numbers up. And there is a theory that holds 'technology' to blame. With the adoption of horses as the main mode of transport, pregnancies became more and more difficult to see to the end. The constant jogging up and down, you see.

[Heraclitus]

Good points made, however, slipping in the feminist theory at the end seems weak. I suggest looking for a deeper causation than feminism. Perhaps feminism itself is an outcome of other factors as well? Like no longer living on farms, the need for office workers, time-saving appliances, etc.

Looks like we will need a slew of "The Feminism Theory of Birth Rate Decline Doesn't Hold Up" headlines in the not so distant future.

[minus the clever name]

Feminism made marriage , family , happiness a sign of degradation and lack of social consciecne. I think too of disgusting gay perverts in SF yelling "breeders' at a family or the bestial creeps at Dupont Circle in DC. If you have to have approval of other women who aborted their babies, left their husbands and now devote their lives to aping Hillary you might as well kill yourself.

[mad.casual]

Demographically speaking, this cannot make up for the dearth of teen moms. But it's an important reminder that for a lot of women, motherhood isn't being rejected, just pushed back.

This is dishonest in the opposite direction of the "women's access to phones leads them to demand more, phones are the problem". If a woman who would've had 2-4 kids starting in her late teens pushes off being a "mother" of 0-1 kids in her late 30s-40s, the distinction between "pushed back" and "rejected" is moot the majority of the time. The fact that you're discussing it in terms of an overall larger demographic collapse is redundantly retarded; "We'll make up the loss, from delay not rejection, on volume."

On the same point, for the vast majority of your graph "teen pregnancy" wasn't a/the issue, and even today it still isn't. Many of the issues with late teen pregnancy, relatively recently, are intentionally conflated with poverty issues.

[mad.casual]

Don’t call it age verification. Call it centralised personal data collection.

^Tell me you haven't filled out your Selective Services card, or had it filled out for you, without telling me you haven't filled out your Selective Services card.

[Zeb]

Looks like there was a bit of a downturn in 2010. Maybe it's a return to the previous trend. Or maybe the coincidence with smart phones becoming very popular around the same time isn't mere coincidence.

[mad.casual]

It's more gaslighting and false premises from ENB.

Nobody's concerned that women literally have their phones stuck in their cooches and can't physically remove them until they're 30 and thus can't have 10 kids by the time they're 25 because they aren't starting at 15 like they used to in 1850. The concern is that, as literally laid out by ACA and Social Security Acts and implied in lots... and lots... and lots of economic calculations, our current and future prosperity is *both* built *and* leveraged on sustainable reproduction.

Alternative presentation:
There are only 2 times on the entire graph where fertility plunges to a point below replacement. One is in 1968 after "The Population Bomb" is published. The other is in 2006 when "An Inconvenient Truth" gets published and broadcast across teh interwebz.

To wit, for the unprecedented amount of wealth and access to information that phones, the internet, and social media provide, late teen girls, by ENB's own reporting elsewhere, are putting off relationships and engaging in anxiety-inducing performative fabrications rather than communicating about, much less fixing, the actual problems.

This is ENB being dumb and saying nobody knows how that knife ended up in the victim's chest or why ENB herself is covered in blood.

[jonnysage]

Good, we need less people. The world did just fine with only 7 billion.

[Vernon Depner]

Yes, when half of them were under 15. Three billion old farts in a population of seven billion is not so workable.

[Stuck in California]

Why not?

[MasterThief]

Are we up to a dozen of these "_______ isn't responsible for a declining birthrate" articles?
Perhaps these are all contributing factors and shape a culture that doesn't emphasize family and children.

[mtrueman]

The theory might be more plausible if it took into account the fact that there are now more than 8 billion smartphones on the planet. That's more than the number of people. Do women who have multiple phone have fewer children than those with only one? Those with one fewer than those who don't have a smartphone? Answers to these questions might shed more light on the question one way or the other.

[mtrueman]

"Densely populated metropolitan areas, where residents are more likely to be culturally liberal, where young people with big professional ambitions are more likely to move, and so on. Places that got connectivity later are going to be more isolated and less densely populated areas, which tend to be more conservative and likely to be hubs of economic opportunity."

I've been focusing on density itself as a factor. Not personal ambition, liberal values or youth. Fertility declines in the plant kingdom as density increases, if only because the competition for scarce resources becomes more intense. Same thing with the animal kingdom of which humans are a part. Over the last century or so 80% of humanity has moved from sparsely populated rural areas to densely populated urban areas. Ignoring this flies in the face of the most fundamental teachings of population biology.

Also ignored is the environmental factors of pollution. Particularly the ubiquitous presence of endocrine inhibitors thanks to the introduction of plastics, especially in the form of tiny particles, found these days everywhere including in the blood of fetuses in the womb. These chemicals contribute to the feminization of boys and virilization of girls, as well as the observed decrease in sperm counts throughout the world. None of this does our fertility rates any favors.

[Rossami]

No, fertility declines as economic opportunities increase. Look at the historical fertility rates of poor but very crowded places like Calcutta, Mexico City, etc and you will still see far higher birth rates than less-crowded but more affluent areas. There may be some theoretical point at which crowding decreases human fertility but no society in history has ever reached that point.

Polystyrene was first discovered in 1839 but the commercial plastics didn't reach the market until the 20th century and didn't hit scale until almost WW2. Like the smartphone "theory", plastics/endocrine disrupters fails to explain the decline that started in 1800. And given that the trend is roughly linear through the introduction of plastics and even reverses during a period when plastic use has continued to increase, it's not even a particularly plausible contributing factor.

[mad.casual]

There may be some theoretical point at which crowding decreases human fertility but no society in history has ever reached that point.

I can't read what's written behind the gray box, but this is unfathomably stupid. But it is a good illustration of the almost deliberate stupidity/dishonesty woven into ENB and others' thinking.

Until the early 20th Century, communal sleeping was not uncommon. One of the main reasons Europeans nearly accidentally wiped out the Native Americans in N. and S. Am. was because they had procreated so prodigiously in dense population environments while the natives hadn't.

[mtrueman]

"I can't read what's written behind the gray box,"

You can. You choose not to,

"But it is a good illustration of ..."
... bad faith and intellectual cowardice.

[mtrueman]

"No, fertility declines as economic opportunities increase."

You're not disputing me. There are more economic opportunities in densely populated cities than in less densely populated rural areas. The reason is probably because of increased competition for scarce resources in the city compared to the countryside. All this is in line with my thesis.

"Look at the historical fertility rates of poor but very crowded places like Calcutta, Mexico City, etc and you will still see far higher birth rates than less-crowded but more affluent areas."

Calcutta was the center of the East India Company's business in India. Later, the capital of the British empire. The rural areas of India were not more affluent. Neither were the other cities. Calcutta was as wealthy as it got. Same with Mexico City, capital of the country,

" Like the smartphone "theory", plastics/endocrine disrupters fails to explain the decline that started in 1800. "

I didn't make myself clear. The fertility decline since 1800 is due to the fact that 80% of humanity has moved from the less dense countryside to the more dense cities, resulting in increasing stress and more intense competition for scarce resources. I never meant to imply that environmental pollution was responsible for decreases in fertility that started in 1800. But endocrine disruptors, those found in plastics, are also linked to low sperm counts, which have been observed and measured in the male population throughout the world since the time of WWII, exactly when you claim plastics 'hit scale.' I don't understand why you are so quick to dismiss pollution as contributing factor, as the times lines up perfectly according to your own figures, and the undisputed negative effects of these chemicals on animal sexual development, including humans. I get that the editors of Reason are loathe to link low fertility with the ubiquity of environmental microplastics and endocrine disruptors, it spoils their narrative of free markets and better living through chemistry. They have their agenda to push. What's your excuse?

[Rossami]

You really don't understand the difference between correlation and causation, do you.

[mtrueman]

I really do. That's why I use the word 'link' throughout my comment. You understand the word 'link', don't you?

[minus the clever name]

You miss the misapprehensions sustaing your "facts"

The famous Redbook survey that explored the connection between family size and maternal happiness found that mothers of four or more children reported the highest levels of life satisfaction. A study by Edith Cowan University echoed this sentiment, finding that parents with four kids were the happiest

"Surveys and commentary suggest that a sizable minority of adults—especially those who already have children—wish they had had more kids than they did, rather than wishing they had fewer. One U.S.‑based analysis notes that about 37% of adults with children either have no children or wish they had more, whereas only a small fraction (under 15%) of parents wish they had had fewer children"

[mtrueman]

It's probably more important to focus on the actual choices families made in real time than their retrospective wishes. The fact remains that families are choosing to have fewer children. Who are we to second guess them?

[mad.casual]

Between "moral panic alert", "Comstock", Bluesky, and "The 'vibecession' wasn't caused by social media." the whole article feels like several repetitive exercises in deliberate retardation and gaslighting.

"A divergence between consumer sentiment and traditional economic indicators" indeed. No membership cards and all these affluent white people picking fights with federal officers using literal links to protest networks is all just stochasm.

Fuck you.

[scotterbee]

My father was one of eight and mother one of four. They had two and say now that they always wanted more children. It's just a crap explanation that confused people say when wrestling with compromised principles. They're really just hedonists at heart who followed culturally accepted delayed gratification long enough to find that it's a dead end. I don't think they're alone based on the number of obnoxious RVs on the road today driven by senior citizens grasping for adventure. These people have no real faith in moral sacrifice or family which has made them shrewd, practical self starters who are also ironically whiny, resentful complainers. This is the boomer stereotype. As my third child is now on the way, I'm actually rather happy that I've demonstrated progress on this front for my progeny. Funny enough, my parents even feel the same way. Children really are a testament of faith in the future.

[Mickey Rat]

"But if the argument here is that birth rates are down because smartphones let women access information and cultural ideas that convinced them to dream bigger, demand better treatment, etc.,..."

Right, then the adoption of feminism is civilizational suicide.

"Then it started falling again, going back down to 2 by 2009. It has mostly declined modestly but consistently since then, reaching 1.89 in 2011, 1.76 in 2017, 1.66 in 2021, and 1.62 in 2024."

Which if it does not come up above replacement levels is a slow moving disaster. Trying to find what the root causes are and developing a solution is kind of important if scarcity of human capital is a problem. The cultural moment that we are in that does not value motherhood as a more important contribution to society than being a careerist might be wrongheaded.

[Vernon Depner]

Yes. There was never a time when women had babies above replacement rate because that's what they really wanted. The were held responsible for fulfilling their duty to make babies. They were under the coercion of needing children to support them in old age. If we have to rely on women having babies just for the joy of it, there's no way we'll be able to reproduce ourselves. Maybe this is part of the answer to the Drake Paradox.

[mad.casual]

There was never a time when women had babies above replacement rate because that's what they really wanted. The were held responsible for fulfilling their duty to make babies.

Once again, the Lincolns' third child was born something like 11 mos. after the death of their second child at 4 yrs. old. I've never [knocks on wood] had to put a kid in the ground. I do have two that are just over a year apart. I can't imagine making another one two months afterwards. Do you really think Abe sauntered over to Mary Todd and said, "Mary, I know you probably don't want to, but it's (y)our duty..."?

They were under the coercion of needing children to support them in old age. If we have to rely on women having babies just for the joy of it,

Fuck this divisive noise. Men don't suffer from needing support in their old age? For all the "If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, so that my children may know peace." women sure spent a lot of time indoors bearing the unbearable burden, sometimes dozens of times over, of being "coerced" into investing in their own future.

If anything, it's the exact fucking opposite. Sterile women engaging in the oldest profession could get three hots and a cot on any given block while men, biologically unable to serve any *other* function, get to serve as cannon fodder or starve in the streets.

[mtrueman]

"Which if it does not come up above replacement levels is a slow moving disaster. "

It'll work itself out. Humans will almost certainly survive. The culture of consumerism and the imperative for endless economic growth will certainly go by the boards. So your great grandchildren don't get a new improved smartphone every year. No big loss.

[AJinNJ]

The solution would be to make it easier for women to do both. Thus the solution isn't libertarian; but pure libertarianism is just as unrealistic as pure socialism, or pure theocracy, or the pure form of any ideology.

So the solution is force (unlibertarian); mandate colleges and universities have day care centers on campus and in dorm buildings. Mandate on-site day cares for employers (or they have to pay for day care at a private facility). Stop demonizing age gaps (my grandparents were 12 years apart, married over 50 years; they had 4 kids - use the formal education system to teach people the difference between power dynamics and age gaps, and what to do if someone in a position of power tries to manipulate them).

[minus the clever name]

No, that would have the opposite effect. Children will be happy with Chocolate ice cream, also with vanilla but only people without kids think you make them most happy by 'Okay, who wants chocolate, who wants vanilla"

Abortion produced an army of haggy discontent women. No fault divorce gave the man open front door.And sexual immorality made sure that the best men knew what women to never marry and they didn't !!!

[AJinNJ]

Sorry, muted "minus" then replied in wrong thread.

[JFree]

This is one of those points that might seem damning—until you think about it for two seconds.

That is almost the exact way a stats classes points out that correlation does not equal causation, that cause has to precede result, and that you have to start with an actual hypothesis and test that rather than just mine patterns.

If I were to hypothesize - fertility rates increase with agriculture/domestication/gathering (v hunting/nomadism) because maternity costs/risks less, food supplies are more certain, and kids can become productive earlier. They decline with urbanization because that puts more emphasis on a nuclear family structure (v extended/tribal), division of labor which creates a cost for raising kids, etc

Certainly that fits with the data in the article:
1790 - fertility 7.04, urbanization 5.1%;
1850 - fertility 5.42, urbanization 15.4%;
1900 - fertility 3.56, urbanization 39.6%;
1930 - fertility <3.00, urbanization 56.1%;

Obviously that doesn't explain the post-WW2 increase in fertility rate - or the post-baby boom reduction but whatever the hypothesis that seems overlaid on 'urbanization' (however you want to fit 'suburbs' into that).

[mad.casual]

Doctor: You need to lose some weight. Your cholesterol is up to 280 mg/dL.
ENB: You're just moral panicking, my cholesterol has been climbing for a while.
Doctor: It wasn't good that it was climbing before. 160 to 180 and even 200 can be a part of natural aging and nothing to really worry about. Especially if you're otherwise eating right and working out, but 280 is serious. You're shaving years off your life. How much fast food do you eat? How much time do you spend sitting on your phone?
ENB: I eat fast food 7X a week and spend an average of 30 hours a week sitting and browsing social media.
Doctor: Yeah. At this point, even if you got back on the horse, it's dubious as to whether you could fix the damage you've done. You really need to cut back. You'd think that with all the social media browsing you would've gotten this message.
ENB: You're wrong! My weight was climbing and my cholesterol was going up *before* I started eating fast food and spending hours on social media every day! You're just trying to oppress my gender and culture!
Doctor: You're not convincing me that fast food and social media aren't the only problems, just that they're the ones I can treat.

[AJinNJ]

Or maybe a major contributing factor is because the majority of men prefer women under 25 and women insist on waiting until their late twenties (by then most men have just lost interest):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronophilia#/media/File:Chronopilic_prefererred_ages_graph_(english).png

Notice, the slop of the line down from the peak around 25 also roughly matches the slop of the sub-fertility line of this chart:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_and_female_fertility#/media/File:Age_and_female_fertility.svg

[minus the clever name]

Most good men want --- surprise !!!--- a good woman. The old advice which was received very approvingly by my Philosophy students was the old Catholic saw :Never date a woman you know you can't of won't marry.

[AJinNJ]

Quite honestly, all soft sciences (including "philosophy") are bullshit. It's opinion institutionalized as fact, to give the ruling elite control over the populace, because "it's science", therefore it's obviously indisputable fact. Bullshit.

BTW, men don't approach women in public unless they're, surprise surprise, physically attracted to them. Dating a co-worker is fucking stupid (good way to get fired), and dating in your own friend group is equally as stupid.

And secondly, marriage is a dead institution. It will be even more dead once we have longevity escape velocity, and people live well over 500 years.

https://youtu.be/YlYFsRKfPiE
Why We Might Stop Aging by 2040: https://youtu.be/1HOPx8QVqhM

You're muted, because you're clearly mentally challenged.

[Vernon Depner]

Oklahoma bill that would have raised the minimum age for strippers to 21

Minimum? The MAXIMUM age for strippers should be 21.

[mad.casual]

Of course, SSDD, with ENB:
Senate Bill 1284 would have required dancers and clubs to get state licenses, set age and criminal conviction restrictions for dancers, and imposed fines and possible jail time for violations.
...
Senate Bill 1284 would have required strippers to obtain licenses to perform and strip clubs to obtain licenses to operate. According to the bill, dancers would have paid a $30 fee and clubs would have paid a $1,000 fee.

Of note: Oklahoma's porn age verification law took effect in 2024. So, it would quite reasonably appear that the law didn't fail to pass (only) because it raised the stripping age to 21, it failed to pass because it imposed fees. An astoundingly libertarian situation that ENB, for some reason, chose to portray in a decidedly different light.

[Marc St. Stephen]

I can't help but laugh every time I hear some panic about birth rate decline. The problem isn't overall birth rate decline, the problem is the quality of birth rate that's changing.

Decreasing: smart people who'd rather live a good life without the cost, liability and likely heartbreak of having kids.

Increasing: Dumb-asses fucking like rabbits, damn the consequences OR bring on the additional government cheese, and pumping out dumb-ass kids, unprepared for life, who end up leeching off of society and do the same damn thing. I mean, where do you think all of these homeless, deranged, drug-addled fucks polluting our streets came from?

[minus the clever name]

Marc, you sound like the biggest ass on here.
Your 'decreasing' is ludicrous as it asumes men and women both have your anti-child outlook.What happens statistically is that a woman marries a shifter like you who doesn't like kids, goes along with it then he opts for the babe who does want kids

" For the U.S., the best available numbers suggest that this path is common: about two-thirds of people who divorce eventually remarry, divorced men remarry slightly more often than divorced women, and among remarried divorced adults, about 46% have a child with their new spouse."

Marc, stop kissing the mirror.

[snarling_dog]

Weird, none of the stories about the decline in birth rates address the obvious - people aren't having enough sex. More intercourse means more babies.

[minus the clever name]

NO, it doesn't. Work on that GED.

[snarling_dog]

Every sperm is sacred. And clever. The only method that is 100% effective in preventing conception is abstinence.

[minus the clever name]

More sex without babies tends to 3 obvious outcomes

1)When a baby comes you want to kill it or at least ditch the non-comliant woman who won't kill it for you

2) You tend to confuse love with sex and end up divorced and maybe hooked to a cow like Laura Sanchez. Sorry, but almost everyone thinks that if he weren't loaded she'd take chimney sweep over him

3) you end up an old guy with no sex at all and wonder why you wasted you whole goddam life 🙂

We all know I"m right.It isn't just gays that suffer from “old queen,” “disposable bear" and the like

[mad.casual]

Just realized the astounding irony that's staring me in the face.

For all the "yeoman phone" and "phones turned off" stupidity; Where's the dip in fertility when women were allowed to read and go to school? Oh, women in The West have never been forbidden from reading or attending school? That women's schools in the US predate the founding of the country by almost 100 yrs., boys in this country didn't generally graduate HS in the 1800s either, and the literacy rate climbed for everyone approximately equally? Huh. Where's the dip when women were finally allowed to wear pants? That was never a thing? Huh.

OK, I know women not being able to vote was a thing, where's the dip when women got the right to vote? Where's the dip when the pill was invented? I know women entering the workforce was a thing, where's the dip when women entered the workforce? I mean, they 'got their own salaries for the first time' then, right? So there should be a massive drop as their personal liberty and wealth spikes? Or is this yet another
"the oppressive, patriarchal Charlie Brown forces Lucy to hold the football" moment where women *would've* had more wealth and lower fertility if it weren't for all the workplace rape and all the sexual harassment?

Honestly, at this point, the whole "Women's fertility drops as they get more free and more wealthy." is beginning to look a lot like a Progressive, Marxist, feminist (misanthropist) religious myth or propaganda along the lines of "a 4 yr. college degree gets you an additional $1M over your lifetime" and "FPTP voting always leads to two, and only two political parties".

Yes, in parts of Africa and the ME where fathers stone their own daughters to death for dressing inappropriately and won't let them read a book, greater social liberty is correlated with lower fertility. Otherwise, in The West and elsewhere, fertility among the most educated and most wealthy is actually better than it is among the middle financial and educational classes and the messaging just-too-conveniently aligns with the "Sleep in pods, eat bugs, support your local teachers' union, be happy." ideology.

[mtrueman]

"So there should be a massive drop as their personal liberty and wealth spikes? "

No. Why would increased wealth and well being discourage families from having or desiring children. If anything the opposite is true.

The fact is that fertility rates in wealthy Western countries have been declining across the board, though not necessarily so steeply with more affluent couples. But the trend to declining fertility holds across all social classes. The obvious question is why.