Fisher-Price Consulted One Doctor, Who Was Not a Pediatrician, Before Selling the Rock 'n Play Sleeper. It Made at Least $200 Million and Was Linked to Roughly 100 Infant Deaths.

The Fisher-Price Rock 'n Play Sleeper went on sale in 2009. It was an inclined seat that held an infant at roughly thirty degrees, marketed for overnight sleep, and it sold on the strength of a simple observation: babies placed in it stopped crying and stayed asleep. Parents bought around 4.7 million of them.

Before putting it on the market, Fisher-Price consulted one doctor. He was not a pediatrician. According to a twenty-month investigation by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, that was the extent of the medical review conducted on a product designed to hold sleeping newborns at an angle, in a decade when every pediatric authority in the country was telling parents to put babies down flat, firm, and on their backs.

The Warnings That Arrived Anyway

The expertise Fisher-Price declined to seek out before launch arrived unsolicited afterwards. The congressional report found the company ignored warnings from pediatricians, from customers, and from regulators in other countries, over a period of years, while the product remained on shelves.

The Rock 'n Play was recalled in April 2019. By then more than fifty infants had died in it. The number of reported fatalities eventually associated with the sleeper is approximately one hundred. Across its decade on the market, the committee found, the product generated at least $200 million in revenue.

The Recall That Had to Be Announced Twice

A recall removes a product from stores. It does not remove it from houses, and it does not remove it from the resale economy, where a nearly new baby item in good condition is exactly the sort of thing a family passes to a cousin or lists locally for fifteen dollars.

In January 2023, Fisher-Price re-announced the recall. The reason for re-announcing it was that more infants had died in Rock 'n Plays after the first recall — in units still in circulation, in the hands of second and third owners who had never heard of the original announcement, because nobody notifies you about a recall on a product you acquired from a stranger.

What the Design Was For

The mechanism that made the Rock 'n Play effective was the mechanism that made it dangerous, and they were never separable. An infant on an incline settles because the position restricts movement. An infant on an incline can also slump into a posture that closes the airway, and a young infant who does so may not have the neck strength to correct it.

The product worked precisely as intended. It kept babies still and asleep on a slope, which is what it was sold to do, and which is the thing that pediatricians had spent thirty years telling people not to do.

The Committee Had a Question

What the oversight report documents is not a manufacturing defect. There was no faulty batch, no supplier failure, no component that behaved unexpectedly in the field. Every Rock 'n Play performed to specification for ten years.

The finding was about a decision: that a product intended to hold sleeping infants could be brought to market on the advice of a single physician who did not practise pediatrics, and that the objections of people who did could be received, considered, and set aside for a decade while the units continued to sell.

Fisher-Price had access to the entire American pediatric profession, which had published its sleep guidance openly and at length, and which would have answered the telephone. It consulted one doctor, who was not one of them, and then sold 4.7 million inclined sleepers.

Filed from public reporting:

• NBC News — "Fisher-Price ignored warnings for sleeper dozens of infants died in, congressional report says"
• ABC News — "Fisher-Price ignored warnings on Rock 'n Play sleepers that led to dozens of infant deaths, congressional report finds"
• NPR — "Fisher-Price re-announces recall of Rock 'n Play sleeper linked to child deaths"
• CBS News — "Fisher-Price Rock 'n Play Sleepers recalled again after more infant deaths"
• U.S. House of Representatives — congressional letter on the Rock 'n Play Sleeper recall
• Office of Rep. Tony Cárdenas — "Cárdenas, Blumenthal & Schakowsky Lead Call for Swift Improvements to the Fisher-Price Rock 'N Play Sleeper Recall Following More Infant Deaths"