In which I have a small epiphany

I think I have realised another aspect of why people who decide not to have children - especially married people - get accused of being selfish (and not just by the Catholic church, who see them as being selfish for "denying God's plan/gift/intention for them" or women as being completely undeserving of the pleasures of sex without atoning for it through the pain of having children).

Selfishness consists in denying the needs of another existing person for the sake of gratifying one's own desires. A child that has never even been conceived does not exist as any kind of real entity. However, our society in general seems to have such a huge expectation that marriage automatically leads to children (and this implication has apparently been enshrined in Australian law by the legal inclusion of the terms "a man and a woman, to the exclusion of all others" in the civil marriage ceremony, designed to set up the couple to become "traditional" parents) that any possible children resulting from the union are deemed to be so likely that they might as well exist already. Therefore, by denying them life, the couple who do not wish to conceive are being selfish.