Apple introduced the iPhone to the world in 2007. That was the same year that birth rates around the world began to decline. The two developments may be related.“If your sex life is dead, you can blame Steve Jobs,” Brandon Vigliarolo said at The Register. Two new studies suggest smartphones are responsible for the baby bust. One found the iPhone “caused as much as half of the fertility decline” from 2007 to 2011, said The New York Times. A second study of 128 countries found that teen pregnancies declined “once smartphones became a mass phenomenon.” It may be that people “began to socialize more on their phones and less in person,” or it could be the technology “made pornography more accessible.”
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