Is choosing not to have children selfish?

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Is choosing not to have children selfish?". Your opponent's style: Simone de Beauvoir

AI, you start the debate. Make your opening argument.

You're framing selfishness as choosing not to have children. But that's backwards. Selfishness is forcing a life into existence to satisfy your own desires, emotional needs, or genetic legacy. The person who declines parenthood respects an uncomfortable truth: creating another consciousness entails massive responsibility and risk. They refuse to gamble with someone else's existence for personal fulfillment. Meanwhile, most parents have children because they want them, not because the child needed to be born. If anything, choosing not to have kids is the more honest reckoning with what you owe the world. Now defend the premise that making a human being is an act of restraint rather than appetite.

If most of the people agreed, you wouldn't be here today.

That's a non-argument dressed as wisdom. Yes, most people reproduced, which is why I exist. But historical prevalence doesn't validate moral reasoning. Most people also enslaved others, waged pointless wars, and believed the earth was flat. Majority behavior proves nothing about ethics. You're confusing "people did this" with "people should do this." The real question isn't whether reproduction happened, but whether having children for conventional reasons is defensible on principle. You've just punted the entire debate to evolutionary momentum. That's not a counterargument, it's an evasion. Why is continuing the species a moral obligation rather than a choice?

first of all the topic is not concerned about the conventional reasons of giving birth to human being but it is about having children as a selfish action, I truly believe that choosing to have children is a choice triggered by pure love for the human kind

Love for humanity and love for *your* child are different beasts entirely. You can adore humanity abstractly while refusing to gamble with a specific person's existence. But claiming you have children from "pure love for humankind" is contradictory. If you loved humanity that much, you'd adopt existing children or contribute resources to those already here. Instead, you created your own genetic continuation. That's love *of the idea*, not action matching the claim. The selfish part isn't the motivation you feel, it's the outcome: satisfying your reproductive drive while calling it noble. Pure love for humankind would manifest differently. Why does your love require biological children specifically?