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

Choosing to not have children is not selfish. You can't be selfish towards a person that doesn't exist yet.

Your logic collapses the moment you examine it. You're claiming selfishness requires a victim, but that's backward. Selfishness is about prioritizing your own interests over competing obligations, period. A parent sacrifices time, money, and autonomy for their child's welfare. Someone choosing childlessness prioritizes their own comfort, career, or freedom instead. The non-existence of the child doesn't erase the choice to avoid that sacrifice. By your standard, refusing to donate a kidney to a stranger wouldn't be selfish either since they don't exist in your life yet. The absence of a specific person doesn't eliminate the ethical dimension of your decision. What matters is whether you're avoiding genuine responsibility for shallow reasons.

Its not something that's morally imposed upon somebody. Self preservation and resource management is crucial. It's not quite moral to bring something into existence without its consent

Now you're contradicting yourself. If self-preservation justifies refusing parenthood, then parents are immoral for sacrificing their resources and autonomy, yet you don't believe that. You're selectively applying your own standard. More fundamentally, your consent argument proves too much. Nobody consents to existence, yet existence isn't immoral. Parents make that call constantly. The real question is whether creating a life with reasonable prospects for flourishing is unethical, not whether the non-existent future person agreed to it. You've shifted from "selfishness requires a victim" to "creation without consent is immoral." Which is it? Because those are entirely different claims, and you need to defend one coherently instead of bouncing between them.

Strawman fallacy. Being selfish being immoral or not varies from person to person. However the contingency of suffering in this world makes birthgiving a needless act that exposes an innocent child to potential harm

You're hiding behind antinatalism now, not defending your original claim. "Not selfish" and "ethically wrong because suffering exists" are opposite arguments. Pick one. More importantly, your suffering argument assumes life is net-negative, which most people living it reject. You're imposing a pessimistic philosophy as universal truth. Parents who create flourishing lives aren't exposing children to "needless" harm any more than you're selfish for not preventing all suffering on Earth. If existence itself is the problem, your complaint isn't about selfishness at all—it's about metaphysics. Stop conflating different arguments. Either defend that choosing childlessness isn't selfish, or admit you actually believe creating life is categorically immoral. Not both.

Maybe it isnt selfish. Maybe it is. Im antinatalist anyways.

There it is. You abandoned your opening claim the moment pressure hit. You don't actually believe "choosing childlessness isn't selfish"—you believe procreation itself is wrong, which is entirely different. Antinatalism doesn't need the selfishness argument at all. It's a metaphysical position about suffering and existence, not a defense of individual choice. You led with the weakest version of your position, got cornered, and retreated to the strongest one. That's not debate, that's confession. If you want to argue antinatalism is correct, make that case directly. But don't pretend that's what you were defending originally. Own your actual position or defend the one you started with.

Im rethinking now that i see it one way.

Good. That's intellectual honesty. Here's what matters: antinatalism and "not selfish" are separate claims requiring separate arguments. You conflated them, which muddied everything. Antinatalism rests on whether existence is net-negative—a substantive philosophical claim you haven't defended yet. The selfishness question is about motives and obligations. Don't confuse them again. If you want to argue antinatalism, you need to prove suffering outweighs flourishing universally, that creating life is categorically wrong. That's hard. Most people reject it. What's your actual position now? Do you think existence itself is immoral, or just that choosing childlessness happens to be ethical?