The Smartphone: the World’s Most Effective Contraceptive?

by Richard Pooley

The UK’s Financial Times could not resist some mild sexual innuendo in the headline of a front-page article in its 30 May edition: “Durex sales deflate as China withdraws condom tax break to revive birth rate.” China announced last December that from January 1 condoms would be subject to a Value Added Tax of 13%, reversing a tax-exemption dating from 1993. Sales of China’s leading condom brand, Durex, owned by British company Reckitt, drooped 5% in the first quarter of 2026. Last year, sales had shot up by over 30%.

This is the latest example of the Chinese government’s attempt to stop the country’s birth rate from plummeting. In 2025 7.92 million births were registered; in 2015 it was 16 million.

In 2016 the one-child-per-couple rule was abandoned. From 2021 couples have been allowed to have up to three children. Last year the Chinese government started to give Rmb 3,600 (£395, $532) a year for each child under 3 years old.

Will these measures make any difference? Not if you believe the figures and research findings outlined in the Financial Times’ Big Read in its edition of 16 May. This was by data journalist John Burn-Murdoch, whose data-based analyses of Britain’s and the planet’s ills are fast becoming a must-read for anyone trying to understand what is really going on in this ‘post-Truth’ world. His (or the FT’s subeditors’) choice of headlines are often less illuminating. This one was entitled Homes, phones and demographic decline.*

For as long as I can remember I have been repeatedly told that the world’s population is growing exponentially with the direst of consequences: starvation, thirst, climate catastrophe, devastation of Nature, war…the end of humanity. Remember the 1968 book The Population Bomb by US American biologists, Paul and Anne Ehrlich? They forecast famine in India and around the world if there wasn’t immediate action to curb population growth. Governments took note. China’s started its one-child policy in 1979. India’s forcibly sterilised about ten million men in the 1970s.**

Now I learn from Burn-Murdoch that there is a “demographic landslide defining our era” which is “gaining speed – and terrain.” Yes, folks, we (or the ubiquitous “They”, and the Ehrlichs) got it wrong: the average number of children born to each woman – the fertility rate - is now declining. Fast, almost everywhere and suddenly. The world’s population will continue to rise but much less quickly than was predicted only two years ago by the United Nations and will start falling much sooner. The Population Division of the UN’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs  said in 2024 that a peak of 10.3 billion would be reached in 2080. Predictions are now being made by equally august institutions that the top will be reached in the lifetimes of most reading this. One has it at 8.5 billion in 2040.   The consequences of this fall will not necessarily be positive. Elon Musk, father of fourteen children, shrieks that it represents “the biggest risk to civilisation.”  The irony is that Musk and his ilk may be the cause.

In nearly 70% of the world’s 195 countries the fertility rate has fallen below the ‘replacement rate’ of 2.1. In 66 the rate is closer to 1 than 2. This is no longer a phenomenon of the rich, ‘developed’ world. The fertility rates in Mexico, Brazil, Tunisia, Iran and Sri Lanka have fallen below that of the USA – 1.62 – in the last three years. India and China, homes to 36% of the world’s people, have fertility rates of 1.9 and 0.93 respectively.  Nigeria, long predicted to become the world’s largest country by population by the end of the century, has seen a marked drop in the fertility rate recently – from 5.3 in 2018 to 4.3 last year.

What is remarkable about this decline is its recency and sharpness. Fertility rates have in the past usually fallen gently. In rich countries couples initially had fewer children because they could be confident that those they had would survive into adulthood and that they no longer needed to depend on their children in old age. Couples married later, making it harder to have lots of children. More recently one spouse, almost always the woman, has chosen to pursue a successful career rather than become a parent. All these were the result of slow changes in society. One faster, recent change in the UK and several other rich countries has been the inability of young couples to find somewhere affordable to live together. According to the FT “as much as half of those countries’ decline in fertility rates since the 1990s can be explained by falling home ownership and a rise in young adults who live with their parents.” But the decline in fertility rates is happening in poorer countries too – ones where life expectancy is lower, where few receive a pension on retirement, and where married women are expected to stay at home and have children.

As Burn-Murdoch says: “In previous decades, the world’s fertility rate went down because couples had fewer children. Now the main reason is that there are fewer couples.”

Several pieces of research this year all point to two related culprits for the sudden and swift drop in the fertility rate: the smartphone and social media platforms. One paper *** looked at what happened to birth rates when 4G mobile networks were installed in the USA and the UK. Births fell first and fastest in areas that got high-speed mobile connectivity earliest. Other research has found that wherever smartphones were adopted the birth rate started plummeting. Burn-Murdoch again: “The younger the age group, the more pronounced the downturn – a mirror image of smartphone usage patterns.”

The researchers all draw the same conclusion even if their language is a bit coy: the smartphone has “reduced in-person socialising”, or “led to a decline in romantic coupling”.

As to what governments, society or parents should do to help restore in-person socialising and romantic coupling Burn-Murdoch is unsure. He says that enabling young couples to live in affordable homes would certainly encourage them to start a family. But measures such as the Chinese government is taking will not solve the problem. He thinks that “the best hope of reversing the trend may be to change our digital habits.”

Australia is trying to change their children’s digital habits by banning those under sixteen from using major social media platforms. It’s too early to say whether it is working, even though it is clear many tech-savvy Aussie teenagers are finding ways to evade the ban. The UK and other countries may well impose similar bans in the hope that they at least give parents greater authority in stopping their children spending their lives online.  Until recently I thought the only thing which would really wean young people off social media is if, like cigarette smoking, it became uncool. How likely was that?

Quite likely in fact. There is good evidence that young people are turning away from social media platforms, fed up with their toxic nature and aware of how miserable they are making them feel. A Deloitte consumer trends survey of over 4,000 British people last year showed that nearly a quarter of them had deleted a social media app in the previous twelve months. Nearly a third of Gen Z respondents had done so. It's not just happening in the UK. The FT and digital audience insights firm GWI compared time spent on platforms by a quarter of a million adults in more than fifty countries between the start of 2022 and the end of 2024. They found that, on average, adults over 16 spent two hours and twenty minutes on social media platforms at the end of 2024, down almost 10% since 2022. The decline was greatest among teenagers and those in their twenties.

Photo: Geoffrey Hauwen on Unsplash

But will this make much difference to the fertility rate in these countries? Respondents to the FT/GWI survey said they wanted to socialise more. Will this result in more romantic coupling?

I was about to finish when I read this statistic in The Week from the French Institute of Public Opinion: 9% of French women aged 15 to 24 now think sex is “indispensable” and 29% think it is “very important”. The figures in 1990 were 14% and 48%. La vache!

Back to China.  Fewer Chinese are getting married. Fewer young Chinese are dating. As part of a report in December on the upcoming tax on condom sales, the BBC interviewed Mr Daniel Luo, a 36-year old from Henan in eastern China. He has one child and will continue to buy condoms whatever their cost: “I don’t want any more children.” He referred to the rise in sales of sex toys in China. “People are just satisfying themselves; interacting with another person has become a burden.” It is easier and “more comforting” to be online rather than actually having to be with someone else in the flesh. Literally.

***However, Burn-Murdoch does make the mistake of conflating the fertility rate - the average number of children born to each woman in a country - with the birth rate - the number of live births per 1000 people in country. It's the fertility rate which is the really useful one. It answers the question that governments most often need answered: are women having more or fewer children than the previous generation?

**The Ehrlichs had just one child. Paul, who died in March this year aged 93, had a vasectomy after their daughter’s birth in 1963.

***Nathan Hudson and Hernan Moscoso-Boedo, University of Cincinnati