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.
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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.
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