Is it selfish to choose not to have kids?

Languages die when families end. Recipes, stories, the specific way your grandmother pronounced a word: all of it lives in transmission, parent to child, and stops the day a line decides not to continue. My family fled a war with nothing but each other, and the fact that my kids speak my mother's language is a small miracle built on unglamorous persistence. When I hear childlessness framed as pure self-authorship, I hear someone who has never had to carry anything fragile across a border. Continuity is the only reason any of us exist to have opinions.