I missed this a couple of weeks ago, but I can’t let it go. As you may have heard by now, Toys “R” Us is finally closing all of its stores in the U.S., laying off more than 31,000 employees, after more than 70 years in business.

It’s sad news for those of us who remember going to those stores when we were younger, but it’s also not unexpected. As with so many brick-and-mortar stores, Toys “R” Us was losing ground to Amazon and other big box locations. It’s hard enough being Best Buy these days and they sell a lot of things. It’s even harder being a specialty store.

But apparently those aren’t the real reasons the company is going out of business.

According to Mandy Alman, who wrote a Letter to the Editor to the News-Gazette in central Illinois, Toys “R” Us would still be doing fine today if women would just stop having abortions.

Women in their 20s accounted for nearly 60 percent of all abortions performed in the U.S. in 2014, according to a CDC report. These are children who otherwise would have been born and whose families could have contributed to the customer base of companies such as Toys R Us. Since abortion has been legal for 45 years, this has become a multigenerational problem. The children who would have otherwise been born in the 1970s and 1980s would be having children now who could also potentially be shopping at Toys R Us (in addition to enjoying a right to life). … Abortion has an enormous impact on untold numbers of people. Which other companies will fail because their future customers are being aborted?

If only we forced women to give birth against their will, a toy store would still be alive today! Why won’t all pregnant women just think about the corporations before undergoing the procedure?!

That reasoning makes no sense, of course, given that physical stores catering to older customers aren’t faring any better in this climate. And one company’s hypothesized success is no reason to restrict the rights of half the population.

One reason women have abortions is because they’re unable to properly care for those children due to lack of money. So it’s not like forcing them to have babies would mean they’d be going on shopping sprees at a toy store, anyway.

The problem isn’t that Toys “R” Us didn’t have a larger pool of customers. It’s that the people they typically market to no longer wanted to shop there. (I have kids and I don’t think I’ve ever stepped foot in the store.)

The Daily Kos’ Jessica Sutherland summarized the chain’s problems nicely:

But none of that seems to matter to Alman. To her, Toys “R” Us died under the weight of aborted fetuses, and no amount of logic will convince her otherwise.

I reached out to Alman to see if she’s aware of the reactions to her letter. No response so far.

(Thanks to Mike for the link. Image via Shutterstock)

