Killing the mood: smartphones reduce birth rate, studies say

WASHINGTON, D.C. — 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 percent since 2007. For a while, experts linked the decline to the recession that struck in 2008 when the global financial system nearly imploded, driv