Baby loungers tied to more deaths than previously announced

The Consumer Product Safety Commission recalled Boppy loungers after babies suffocated. But other infant loungers remain for sale, and more babies have died.

This article is Part 1 of “Death by Delay,” a series on how consumer product hazards have cost lives. 

BETHESDA, Md. — In September 2021, federal officials grew so alarmed by the number of babies who had suffocated after being laid down on a popular infant lounger that they issued an urgent notice to parents: Stop using it immediately. 

The padded, pillowy Boppy Newborn Lounger — sold to exhausted caregivers who relied on it as a safe place to put their infants — was linked to the deaths of eight babies, the Consumer Product Safety Commission warned. The federal agency announced a recall of more than 3 million of the loungers, which had been a mainstay of baby registries for years. 

CPSC staff members then wanted to go a step further. It wasn’t just one manufacturer’s infant lounger that posed a potentially lethal threat; the agency next planned to consider sweeping regulation of other cushioned infant loungers, which some experts and officials believed were just as unsafe as the Boppy lounger. The move could have forced manufacturers to redesign their loungers or stop selling them, according to interviews with current and former CPSC employees, industry representatives and safety advocates.

But one day after the Boppy recall was announced, the CPSC’s two Republican commissioners — who at the time held a majority — scrapped that more comprehensive action, approving an annual operating plan that removed a proposal for regulating infant pillows, according to interviews and a review of the documents. 

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/baby-lounger-deaths-infant-pillow-boppy-cpsc-rcna84119

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