Is the iPhone the Most Effective Birth Control Ever Invented?

**Michael Smerconish** (0:00)
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**Caitlyn Myers** (1:04)
Ditch the clowns on the left.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:05)
And the jokers on the right.

**Caitlyn Myers** (1:07)
And join Michael Smerconish right here in the middle.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:10)
This is The Smerconish Podcast for Independent Minds.

**Michael Smerconish** (1:14)
In the 1950s, women had an average of 3.5 births. Today, that number is 1.62. It's below the so-called replacement rate of 2.1.
It's a trend that shows no signs of reversing nearly 710,000 fewer babies born in the United States in 2025 than in 2007, and even fewer are predicted for 2026 Which brings me to Professor Caitlyn Myers, the John G. McCullough Professor of Economics at Middlebury College, who caught my eye recently in a story from NPR that talked about her research under the headline, Can Smartphones Help Explain the Drop in Birth Rates? Professor Myers, thank you so much for being here. Tell me about your work in this regard.

**Caitlyn Myers** (2:07)
Sure.
You talked about the decline in what's called, we often refer to as fertility, in this case, the number of children women are having in their reproductive lifetimes.
What I think is particularly interesting about it is that not only is it falling, not only is it well below replacement, but it's also well below the number of children people say they want to have. A really important piece of this puzzle that we face in understanding declining fertility, is that it doesn't seem to just be about the deliberate choices that people are making. In fact, the decline is driven in large part by declines in unintended births to younger people, which have plummeted. The total births are down about 22% since 2007, but births to teens are down 70% since 2007 I mean, they have just fallen off a cliff, and we really have a lot of questions about why. And so my work comes in with one explanation. I'm not going to tell you it's the only explanation. You know, if somebody comes in and tells you there's one answer to a complicated problem, you should be skeptical. But I think one piece of this is their phones.

**Michael Smerconish** (3:14)
And 2007, in that regard, was a critical year, right? A milestone year.

**Caitlyn Myers** (3:20)
It was a critical year in a few ways. So first of all, in 2007, we saw after births had been stable for quite a few years in the US, they started to fall. There's a real inflection point. And initially, I don't think anybody was particularly surprised by that.
It's the Great Recession. There's a housing crisis. It's the Great Recession. Economists like me have long known that births are what we call procyclical. So when the economy is good, we tend to see more births. When the economy is bad, we tend to see fewer. So initially, we were like, all right, it's a recession, births will rebound. But then we had a baby-less recovery. The economy came back and births kept right on plummeting. And it was really at that point where people started to say, what's going on here? And one of the explanations that I've always thought was particularly interesting but really hard to prove, is that it might have something to do with changing technology. And in particular, with the introduction of smartphones.
I don't think anybody needs me to pull out statistics to tell you this, but we're all on our phones all the time. People are constantly in their phones, looking at their phones, engaging in social media. Young people in particular spend a lot of time on their phones. And this has corresponded with a rise in loneliness. People are saying they're more lonely, they're interacting with others less in person. And if there is one thing I learned in Abstinence Only Sex Ed in Georgia in the 90s that I carry with me to this project, it's that if you're not seeing people in person, you're probably not going to get pregnant. And so the hypothesis here is that smartphones are changing the way we interact with each other and form relationships.