Bring back unwanted teen pregnancies!

This is a garbage framing of the issue. The article takes a real demographic fact — birth rates have been falling — and gives the most headline-friendly tech explanation: smartphones. But that is a weak causal story compared with the much more direct variables everyone is living through: housing costs, wage stagnation, student debt, childcare costs, healthcare costs, delayed household formation, and wealth being increasingly captured by the top of the economy. Yes, smartphones may be associated with reduced in-person socializing or changed dating behavior. But that does not make them the root cause. They could just as easily be a proxy for urbanization, class, education, income, broadband access, cultural change, or other regional differences. AT&T iPhone coverage from 2007–2011 is clever as a study design, but it is still not magic. Coverage maps are not randomly assigned social experiments. The more plausible causal chain is simpler: wealth concentrates -> assets inflate -> housing and adulthood become unaffordable -> people delay marriage/children -> fertility falls Blaming the phone is convenient because it turns a structural economic problem into a consumer-behavior story. It lets everyone avoid the harder conclusion: people are not having fewer kids because Steve Jobs invented the iPhone. They are having fewer kids because stable adult life has become too expensive and too insecure.

Any article that mentions the decline of teen fertility as a problem is a propaganda piece. Its authors are awful human beings and deserve to rot in hell for all eternity.

In 2026, teens should not ever be getting pregnant. We don't live in that world any longer. Whoever that bothers needs to rethink their life choices.

Film at 11:00.

Throw in a decline in the use/abuse of alcohol, and you've got declining fertility, which should surprise nobody. :)

will be calm, fact-based and respectful of peoples opinions.

I guess if you just let teens have access to porn, they get each other pregnant less. Maybe that's not such a bad thing after all then! Like, the only time we want people to have successful, productive, reproductive sex is like, maybe between one and four times in their mid-30's, right? Who cares if they're looking at porn for every other private heavensent orgasm of their life? Who actually fucking cares?

If humans have to rely on unintenional/accidental/forcible conception to maintain sustainable birth rates then it's probably a good thing that the birth rates are tanking.

That said, blaming smartphonnes on this is obviously bupkis, considering Japan fell down the sub-2 hole in late 1970s; very much before even cellphones.

I personally like to believe (and this is very much a matter of faith, as nature itself couldn't care less how many generations of slightly above average lemmings drown themselves million t

A) We don't want teens getting pregnant as a general rule.

B) We don't want adults to be socially inept.

Smartphones are not an amusing solution to A when they develop into a problem with B. Beyond that, the kids aren't as happy as they used to be either.

So teen fertility rates are perhaps a useful proxy for socialization at the moment, but we need to work to divorce the two things so that "happy, social teens" aren't "at risk of pregnancy teens".

The iPhone launch is also partly responsible for microplastics in everyone's balls. It's a double whammy.

No bars? May as well jump the wife again.

They also aren't going to bars. They are also using fewer recreational drugs than previous generations. They are also hooking up and having sex far less frequently. They are measurably less intelligent than previous generations. Fewer of them enjoy reading, and the ones who do, read less than previous generations, and at a lower grade level. Fewer of them are able to write an entire paragraph in English at grade level.

It just keeps going and going.

It's a correlation not causation. The real cause is high taxes. When you tax people too much, they cannot afford to raise as many children to the standards they expect.

This basically peels your civilization back, tearing off the most intelligent first, and leaves an idiocracy of angry morons.

When I first read this post, I thought the same as you: garbage framing.

You've nicely posited some alternative explanations -- NONE OF WHICH are addressed in the first paper linked (Is the iPhone Birth Control? Causal Evidence from AT&T’s 2007–2011 Carrier Monopoly), contrary to one reply below yours.

Correlation, as we know, is not causation. Until proven otherwise, those research efforts are just blind to many other possible causes.

There's also evidence that violent crime has reduced during this timeframe. The hypothesis is that it's due to people not being so bored, or finding alternative things to do. I don't have a citation, but crime has dropped a lot since the smartphones have become available broadly.

Correlation is not... Oh forget it.

I guess we've moved on from moral panic over Tinder and "hookup culture."

Birth rates have been falling globally for fifty years and in many western countries for more like 250 years.

Teach girls marriage is slavery. Teach boys approaching girls is harassment. Subsidize divorce. Take away mens support networks. Tell women if they're not working something is wrong with them. Tilt college entrance and careers heavily toward the graphic that only wants to date up. Give all the wealth to the upper, upper class. Make housing expensive. Make health care prohibitive.

Why are birth rates collapsing? Must be smart phones.

A quick search says that in 2011 only 35% of American adults owned a smartphone of any kind. Only the wealthiest teens would've had them, and those are the least likely teens to experience unwanted pregnancies in the first place.

Did teen fertility decline first among the wealthy and then later and to a lesser extent among the poor? That could be evidence. But if you're doing a study purely of iPhones, especially from 2007-2011, you're not getting the data to compare different socioeconomic classes.