WASHINGTON — As governments around the world struggle with ways to reverse plunging birth rates, new US studies suggest they have ignored a key culprit -- the smartphone.
"Is the iPhone Birth Control?" asked a paper published Monday by the National Bureau of Economic Research, delving into why US fertility rates have fallen by 22% since 2007.
For a while, experts linked the decline to the recession that struck in 2008 when the global financial system nearly imploded, driving millions of people into hardship. But when the economy picked up, a rebound in births never came.
