My partner and I are expecting our first child. She was building out a Wishlist on Amazon for things we’d need. Most of what was picked was not on Prime, was not sold by Amazon.com and had few (<10) reviews.
We had to have “the talk” about Amazon and how looking for “deals” on crap to buy the baby isn’t smart. I wouldn’t buy replacement windshield wipers for my car on Amazon, let alone a crib the baby would sleep in.
I believe you have been downvoted because your comment is irrelevant to the article. As far as I understand it, Rock 'n Play and similar are dangerous for infant death not because of their construction quality, but because the shape of the device is fundamentally unsafe.
You're correct, but given the problems that Amazon has with counterfeit goods and allowing the sale of uncleared products in regulated categories, OP does have a point.
Tragedy that this has happened. That being said, I'm not sending mine back. I've had it for 5 years since our first was born and my third uses it regularly now.
The babies don't sleep in it during the night. I buckle them in and I use my foot to help soothe them to sleep next to me while I work at my desk. If they sleep in it, I'm awake and alert and with them.
We had one child who had acid reflux which doctors suggest putting them on an incline, so we had them sleep in there a few years ago before they could roll.
Hopefully a safer equivalent comes out for future parents.
Yeah I get a feeling people were using these to kind of get out of soothing the baby at night. People were putting their baby in it and like walking away or going back to bed.
The Snoo I think is what most people want, but it's pretty expensive. But you can put the baby down, restrain them properly and then walk away or go to bed.
You're right, however there is an accessory you can buy that attaches to the legs and adds a slight (8-10cm) incline. We used that with our daughter up until 5.5 months.
I don't think you meant it this way, but just a note: it's not selfish for parents to prioritize getting some sleep for themselves at night. It is not good (or safe) for anyone if all the care providers are too sleep deprived to function.
Cosleeping solves both problems. A sober adult will not roll over onto the baby and a mother can sleep through even feeds. Around month three of our first child my wife commented that it was amazing our daughter was sleeping through the night without feeding. But she’s just fuss a little and my wife would roll over and feed her on demand without waking up. It was so easy for both of us.
Worth noting that the AAP recommends against cosleeping. Cosleeping proponents like to point out that it is not very risky after you account for factors like alcohol use. But I think "not very risky" could also describe this rocker that's been recalled.
Co-sleeping is strongly advised against in many countries. Don't do it. If you really subscribe to all that attachment parenting stuff, get one of those cots you can put next to your own bed with one side of the cot open towards you.
(I'm a parent of a two month old in the Netherlands.)
This has happened. Some people are just very deep sleepers. We’ve resorted to co-sleeping on occasion, but I’m not about to pretend that I feel great about it.
Yes, this is the safest option because of how much it helps with sleep and how much breastfeeding it facilitates. The (sober) mother effectively cannot roll on the baby.
Pediatric associations mostly don’t like it because it seems improper or too slum-like to share a bed with a baby. The opposition to cosleeping isn’t based on actual relative danger or long-term outcomes.
Keep in mind how many mothers there are, and how many of those rare incidents had extenuating circumstances (substances, atypical neurology in the mother.) Keep in mind how easy and cheap it is today to extend the width of a bed with an attachment.
I know that the downvotes come from people who think of mothers sleeping with their children as poor trash—it’s a seriously outdated view that hurts the child.
Co-sleeping is basically at the very top of the list of things "they" say YOU SHOULD NEVER EVER DO, OR YOU ARE A TERRIBLE PARENT. So I don't think its fair to recommend it as an alternative to pretty much any other sleep contraption.
I have various other sleep problems, but fortunately none of them are caused by/cause me to move while asleep, not even so much as rolling onto my side.
But a great many people are not so perfectly immobile, sober or not, and if you haven't had a problem with rolling off a sleeping surface or breaking things by moving in your sleep, you likely won't consider it a risk.
Measles killed 3 kids in the last 20 years. A rocking sleeper by Mattel killed 10 in the last 4 years. Yet we think anti-vaxxers are the devils. Priorities in all the wrong places.
Some 400 kids drown unintentionally in swimming pools in the US every year. Homeowners with pools are baby killers.
The only way my three kids would sleep at night was in one of these. Probably acid reflux, but it’s a bummer these are getting recalled. I don’t really understand how a child could suffocate in a rock and play any more so than in a traditional crib.
Parents were using them without the straps when the child could roll. So the child would roll over, and lay face down with high walls, likely resulting in a perfect SIDS environment.
Same here, it was the only way we could get my daughter (now 3 years old) to go to sleep. I spent many a long evening lying on the floor (so she couldn't see me over the edge), rocking it with my foot.
Ours had mesh sides which I think would allow breathing even if the baby managed to roll, so I'm not 100% what the dangerous scenario that triggered the recall could be.
Same thing, three years old now, used on of these for the first three months. I'd sleep on the couch with him next to me and rock it while I dozed all night, to give the wife some rest. All my parent friends had good sleepers so I've felt like an outlier, nice to hear a similar story.
People also put their kids in cars and drive them around to put them to sleep, and hundreds of children are killed every year in car wrecks but nobody is recalling the cars.
You shouldn't be getting downvoted. This is a good point. Not that cars should actually be recalled because of this, but that there are risks on all sides that parents are constantly weighing and navigating.
I suspect it is truly less safe for parents to be critically sleep deprived than for a baby to sleep in one of these. Especially in the first couple months when you're driving to the doctor all the time. Are there statistics on car accidents including infants due to sleep deprivation? Or even just injuries due to dropping babies when sleep deprived? I suspect it would be hard to gather these because parents don't like to acknowledge (even to themselves) how much the sleep deprivation is affecting them.
I burst out laughing but this is a sad reality. People really do lose their minds when they can’t sleep. And we know from DST change days that sleep deprivation causes transport fatalities.
Two of ours ended up on (very mild) drugs for acid reflux, for a little while. Friggin' lifesaver, that stuff.
With the first one we had to switch doctors to finally get one who'd listen to us (no, shrieking like they're on fire when you lay them down or hold them in the wrong position, and starting to drink from a bottle, then shrieking for a bit, then taking some more, then shrieking for a bit is not normal kid fussiness and we are not being oversensitive first-time parents, you asshole) so that one'd burned their throat quite raw by the time we got ahold of the medicine, but things got way better in a matter of days anyway. Knew what to look for with the other second one who had it, got it taken care of fast, and damn was that easier. Practically an instant fix, in that case, without all the weeks of accumulated damage. A++++ would reach for meds at the first sign of reflux again. Those few weeks without on the first one were... very bad. Very, very bad.
The drugs are magic. I will say ours still benefited from inclined sleeping even with the drugs.
We used the Rock N' Play for several months then got a foam wedge that goes under an infant mattress (which frankly didn't work too well, they'd roll down the hill).
Oh yeah, incline on the first one with the (temporarily) effed-up throat remained helpful for a while. We also ended up on some wicked-expensive prescription formula stuff with that one, for two or three months. God was that a lot of money.
> We used the Rock N' Play for several months then got a foam wedge that goes under an infant mattress (which frankly didn't work too well, they'd roll down the hill).
I'm having a really fun time imagining the scene when you realized it was doing this :-)
I have an 8 month old. We still use an incline sleep pad placed under his mattress (i.e. not under the mattress cover, literally between the crib bottom and mattress). It did help a little with his reflux, and so did Prevacid. But after 30 days of Prevacid, our paediatrician referred us to a GI specialist because she doesn't like doing a refill without the consult.
After a lot of back and forth, and difficult times, we eventually determined that he actually has FPIES, and was having issues with cow's milk. My wife cut it from her diet completely (i.e. won't even have processed products that have milk ingredients in them), and his reflux, spitting up, eczema, and tantrums while nursing disappeared.
I mention this because it's a super obscure and rare issue, and if some new parent reads this comment, it might save them some aggravation.
We also had an infant that refused to sleep horizontally. Baby Zantac helped, but it turned out to be a milk protein intolerance. When mommy cut milk products out of her diet entirely his symptoms disappeared entirely. Makes me wish we'd tried it earlier - we'd noticed possible symptoms early (at around 1 month) but because of the inconvenience for mommy our pediatrician didn't want to officially diagnose until blood appeared in his stool at around 4 months.
It's more common than many people think - up to 15% of infants, which is almost 1 in 6.
We had the exact same issue with our now 17 month old. My wife did the same and cut dairy and soy out of her diet for over a year and the problem went away. Good news is it goes away with time, so she was able to gradually introduce dairy to him with success and she’s been able to eat it again too.
Yeah, I think it was Prilosec. With the first one, who had it the worst and had some actual damage by the time we got ahold of the medicine, we also ran through every formula known to man and ended up on some prescription stuff that comes in tiny cans that are nonetheless like double the price of a huge container of the normal kind, then managed to pull back to merely the most expensive variety of normal formula after a couple months.
I'm not sure how large a factor that was compared with just the medicine. The medicine was enough with the other one who had it. If you're managing to do all breast feeding some of the other posts here mention cutting dairy (and soy? One of them says) from the mother's diet helped a lot.
In addition to rolling over and suffocating, young babies with weak neck muscles died through positional asphyxia. Their heads tilted to one side and closed off the airways as they slept. It’s the same reason infants aren’t supposed to sleep in car seats outside of the car- the additional risk is worth it while driving, but not while stationary.
I’ve never seen one. The best workaround is the SNOO, a ‘smart’ bassinet that is flat, rocks the baby, and is certified as a safe sleep surface. Unfortunately it costs upward of a thousand dollars while the Rock N’ Play only costs $40.
Mattel said in a statement on Friday that it stood by the safety of its products but agreed to the voluntary recall “due to reported incidents in which the product was used contrary to the safety warnings and instructions.”
People would put stuff in the crib with the baby, padding, leave them unattended, etc. The product isn't at fault, it's the parents who are too stupid to read/follow directions.
Proper safety engineering accounts for human factors. Blaming the parents is improper.
Safety-critical fields like aviation assume that trained, certified pilots are fallible and design their systems to be resilient against human error. This is a product design to be sold to and used by not just laypeople, but laypeople who have probably only gotten four hours of sleep in the last four weeks.
There's two kinds of parents: Those who have left their child asleep unattended in a Rock 'N Play for a few minutes, and liars.
If you design a product aimed particularly at new sleep deprived parents, you have to assume imperfect usage. And a product that a baby can sleep in will be left unattended for a few minutes, that's just a fact of life. The doorbell will ring, you'll make lunch, you'll put in the laundry, go bathroom, whatever it is. You aren't going to wake up a sleeping baby every time you step out of the room momentarily.
And this coming from a big fan of the Rock N' Play.
Have to agree here. We're talking about potentially avoidable deaths. Blaming the parents won't help, parents will keep doing things like this. I don't think they realized it could mean their child dying.
The product doesn't lead to children dying. It increases the risk of a certain type of fatality when used improperly, with the overall odds still being miniscule.
And yes, parents have to take some responsibility. Nothing will ever be 100% safe.
How do you engineer away the ability to put blankets in a rocker, or crib for that matter?
Aviation tackles a lot of this with rigorous checklists, drilling, and constant ongoing training. They don't just design the plane to be impossible to fly wrong.
Reading the consumer reports report was a bit more scary to me...
At 4 a.m., when the mother checked, all was well, but by 7 a.m., the baby had stopped breathing. Her head was tilted to the side with her chin on her shoulder, compressing her airway. She was pronounced dead at the scene from positional asphyxia, or an inability to breathe caused by her position.
and
In one, on July 25, 2014, a 7-week-old boy was placed in a Rock ’n Play Sleeper while his grandmother was in the room, according to a lawsuit filed against Fisher-Price that was ultimately dismissed. The grandmother, Jan Hinson, of Greenville, S.C., says she looked at her grandson and saw he was “cocked over all the way, and he was blue and lifeless. It was absolutely awful.” She got the infant breathing again, and after a stay in the hospital, he was released.
These weren't caused by children placed in the rock n play with extra stuff in it or children that rolled over, it was because an infant sleeping at an angle puts them at risk of dropping their head down and cutting off their airway.
We have a newborn 4 weeks old and received a rock n play as a gift. I put the baby in it next to me while I was working at my desk and I was constantly worried his head was tipped too far forward, it's not surprising to me that accidents like this have happened. When the baby was in the NICU the doctors highlighted to us multiple times that when babies sleep they need to be on a flat firm surface with no other items with them.
In 2010, the CPSC made it their recommendation that only flat angles of less than 5 degrees were safe, but Mattel lobbied to add a separate exception for surfaces of greater than 10 degrees so the rock n play would not violate their standards.
The company marketed it as a ‘sleeper’, with an image of a mother sleeping in bed while her child sleeps in the Rock N’ Play. The parents should have read the manual, but Fisher-Price deliberately marketed it in a way that is fundamentally unsafe.
I respect that they recalled it amid the pressure, but I feel for all the families, including mine, who would be SOL without the rock n play. It was the only thing that worked until 4 months.
I also really feel for the families who lost their babies this way. What an unfathomable horror.
At the risk of being “that contrarian guy”, I’m going to say it: this danger here is overblown. And yes, I used a Rock ‘n Play for my firstborn and I plan to use it for the one on the way. The reason these children died is because the parents were putting them in Rock ‘n Play after the point at which the children could roll over by themselves, which F-P explicitly said NOT TO DO.
It’s a great product if you use it the way you’re supposed to...
And keep in mind the baby isn't going to tell you "I can roll over now". No, one day he'll just do it, and surprise the hell out of you. Be _extra_ vigilant of your kids, it's not worth the risk.
The initial warning last week said this was due to infants over 3 months who were capable of rolling and not using the harness. They also said only 10 deaths.
Consumer Reports did an investigation and discovered 32 deaths, including some where the infant was less than 3 months old and died without rolling over.
> There is, for example, the mother in Hidalgo County, Texas, who placed her 2-month old daughter on her back for a night’s sleep on Oct. 19, 2013, according to a lawsuit filed by the family against Fisher-Price. At 4 a.m., when the mother checked, all was well, but by 7 a.m., the baby had stopped breathing. Her head was tilted to the side with her chin on her shoulder, compressing her airway. She was pronounced dead at the scene from positional asphyxia, or an inability to breathe caused by her position.
> The most recent deaths CR found occurred in spring 2018—one involving a 1-month-old girl in Knoxville, Tenn., and the other a 9-day-old boy in Copperas Cove, Texas.
There's another where a 7-week-old nearly died with their grandmother in the room, but thankfully she noticed the kid turning blue and lifeless and got him breathing again in time.
It's not all rolling over, the NYT article, unsurprisingly (cheap shot, but their quality has fallen) doesn't mention that there's a significant risk or positional asphyxiation.[1]
The same incline which is helping with the likely reflux, is also putting the neck in such a position that the windpipe can be collapsed.
[1] my wife, who's let me bend the AAP guidelines on everything but safe sleep.
Following a strict list of guidelines that ensure the infant is in the most uncomfortable position imaginable, making absolutely certain that they are physically incapable of falling asleep.
Haha that sounds about right. I meant to say is there a magical product that will set them to sleep for 8 hours straight without pooping, peeing and that will burp them occasionally?
Its called hired nighttime help. We did that with #2, after the experience of going through hell with #1.
(Thankfully, both became quite easy to deal with after a few weeks. But at the beginning, its hard to see past the next 24 hours.)
Lots of (surprisingly angry sounding) people in this thread blaming sleep deprived parents for not reading the manual of something that Should Just Work.
Comparing the risk to driving a baby around in a car is a fallacy.
The product is badly designed: once the baby can turn over there is a risk of suffocation and the product does not allow for that (but it should).
A better comparison is to compare this product to the same product without the design faults, be that mesh fabric or whatever.
The problem is actually worse than that: even if you buckle your baby in it’s still unsafe for unmonitored sleeping as the baby’s airway can compress due to the incline. Using the product as the picture and text on the box depicts (sleeping next to Mom as she sleeps in bed, great for ‘all-night’ sleep) risks death. The initial CSPC statement and the company’s response all (deliberately?) ignore that issue and those deaths.
The American Academy of Pediatrics is clear: the only safe way to sleep is on a baby’s back, with no padding and on a flat surface. This product was never certified for safe sleep; Fisher-Price calls it a ‘sleeper’ instead of a regulated term like bassinet or crib to get around this fact.
Exactly. The CEOs should be charged with murder and the company sued into extinction. There is clear intent to mislead new parents into thinking this is safe.
71 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] threadWe had to have “the talk” about Amazon and how looking for “deals” on crap to buy the baby isn’t smart. I wouldn’t buy replacement windshield wipers for my car on Amazon, let alone a crib the baby would sleep in.
everyone here already agrees, now lets talk about this issue at hand.
The babies don't sleep in it during the night. I buckle them in and I use my foot to help soothe them to sleep next to me while I work at my desk. If they sleep in it, I'm awake and alert and with them.
We had one child who had acid reflux which doctors suggest putting them on an incline, so we had them sleep in there a few years ago before they could roll.
Hopefully a safer equivalent comes out for future parents.
Yeah I get a feeling people were using these to kind of get out of soothing the baby at night. People were putting their baby in it and like walking away or going back to bed.
The Snoo I think is what most people want, but it's pretty expensive. But you can put the baby down, restrain them properly and then walk away or go to bed.
I don't think you meant it this way, but just a note: it's not selfish for parents to prioritize getting some sleep for themselves at night. It is not good (or safe) for anyone if all the care providers are too sleep deprived to function.
(I'm a parent of a two month old in the Netherlands.)
This has happened. Some people are just very deep sleepers. We’ve resorted to co-sleeping on occasion, but I’m not about to pretend that I feel great about it.
Pediatric associations mostly don’t like it because it seems improper or too slum-like to share a bed with a baby. The opposition to cosleeping isn’t based on actual relative danger or long-term outcomes.
This is untrue.
Keep in mind how many mothers there are, and how many of those rare incidents had extenuating circumstances (substances, atypical neurology in the mother.) Keep in mind how easy and cheap it is today to extend the width of a bed with an attachment.
I know that the downvotes come from people who think of mothers sleeping with their children as poor trash—it’s a seriously outdated view that hurts the child.
I have various other sleep problems, but fortunately none of them are caused by/cause me to move while asleep, not even so much as rolling onto my side.
But a great many people are not so perfectly immobile, sober or not, and if you haven't had a problem with rolling off a sleeping surface or breaking things by moving in your sleep, you likely won't consider it a risk.
Some 400 kids drown unintentionally in swimming pools in the US every year. Homeowners with pools are baby killers.
Ours had mesh sides which I think would allow breathing even if the baby managed to roll, so I'm not 100% what the dangerous scenario that triggered the recall could be.
I suspect it is truly less safe for parents to be critically sleep deprived than for a baby to sleep in one of these. Especially in the first couple months when you're driving to the doctor all the time. Are there statistics on car accidents including infants due to sleep deprivation? Or even just injuries due to dropping babies when sleep deprived? I suspect it would be hard to gather these because parents don't like to acknowledge (even to themselves) how much the sleep deprivation is affecting them.
Hell, murder-suicides while sleep deprived.
With the first one we had to switch doctors to finally get one who'd listen to us (no, shrieking like they're on fire when you lay them down or hold them in the wrong position, and starting to drink from a bottle, then shrieking for a bit, then taking some more, then shrieking for a bit is not normal kid fussiness and we are not being oversensitive first-time parents, you asshole) so that one'd burned their throat quite raw by the time we got ahold of the medicine, but things got way better in a matter of days anyway. Knew what to look for with the other second one who had it, got it taken care of fast, and damn was that easier. Practically an instant fix, in that case, without all the weeks of accumulated damage. A++++ would reach for meds at the first sign of reflux again. Those few weeks without on the first one were... very bad. Very, very bad.
We used the Rock N' Play for several months then got a foam wedge that goes under an infant mattress (which frankly didn't work too well, they'd roll down the hill).
> We used the Rock N' Play for several months then got a foam wedge that goes under an infant mattress (which frankly didn't work too well, they'd roll down the hill).
I'm having a really fun time imagining the scene when you realized it was doing this :-)
After a lot of back and forth, and difficult times, we eventually determined that he actually has FPIES, and was having issues with cow's milk. My wife cut it from her diet completely (i.e. won't even have processed products that have milk ingredients in them), and his reflux, spitting up, eczema, and tantrums while nursing disappeared.
I mention this because it's a super obscure and rare issue, and if some new parent reads this comment, it might save them some aggravation.
It's more common than many people think - up to 15% of infants, which is almost 1 in 6.
I'm not sure how large a factor that was compared with just the medicine. The medicine was enough with the other one who had it. If you're managing to do all breast feeding some of the other posts here mention cutting dairy (and soy? One of them says) from the mother's diet helped a lot.
Good luck :-/
Once you get past this, 6-18mo is a great time.
Mattel said in a statement on Friday that it stood by the safety of its products but agreed to the voluntary recall “due to reported incidents in which the product was used contrary to the safety warnings and instructions.”
People would put stuff in the crib with the baby, padding, leave them unattended, etc. The product isn't at fault, it's the parents who are too stupid to read/follow directions.
Safety-critical fields like aviation assume that trained, certified pilots are fallible and design their systems to be resilient against human error. This is a product design to be sold to and used by not just laypeople, but laypeople who have probably only gotten four hours of sleep in the last four weeks.
There's two kinds of parents: Those who have left their child asleep unattended in a Rock 'N Play for a few minutes, and liars.
If you design a product aimed particularly at new sleep deprived parents, you have to assume imperfect usage. And a product that a baby can sleep in will be left unattended for a few minutes, that's just a fact of life. The doorbell will ring, you'll make lunch, you'll put in the laundry, go bathroom, whatever it is. You aren't going to wake up a sleeping baby every time you step out of the room momentarily.
And this coming from a big fan of the Rock N' Play.
And yes, parents have to take some responsibility. Nothing will ever be 100% safe.
Aviation tackles a lot of this with rigorous checklists, drilling, and constant ongoing training. They don't just design the plane to be impossible to fly wrong.
At 4 a.m., when the mother checked, all was well, but by 7 a.m., the baby had stopped breathing. Her head was tilted to the side with her chin on her shoulder, compressing her airway. She was pronounced dead at the scene from positional asphyxia, or an inability to breathe caused by her position.
and
In one, on July 25, 2014, a 7-week-old boy was placed in a Rock ’n Play Sleeper while his grandmother was in the room, according to a lawsuit filed against Fisher-Price that was ultimately dismissed. The grandmother, Jan Hinson, of Greenville, S.C., says she looked at her grandson and saw he was “cocked over all the way, and he was blue and lifeless. It was absolutely awful.” She got the infant breathing again, and after a stay in the hospital, he was released.
https://www.consumerreports.org/recalls/fisher-price-rock-n-...
These weren't caused by children placed in the rock n play with extra stuff in it or children that rolled over, it was because an infant sleeping at an angle puts them at risk of dropping their head down and cutting off their airway.
We have a newborn 4 weeks old and received a rock n play as a gift. I put the baby in it next to me while I was working at my desk and I was constantly worried his head was tipped too far forward, it's not surprising to me that accidents like this have happened. When the baby was in the NICU the doctors highlighted to us multiple times that when babies sleep they need to be on a flat firm surface with no other items with them.
In 2010, the CPSC made it their recommendation that only flat angles of less than 5 degrees were safe, but Mattel lobbied to add a separate exception for surfaces of greater than 10 degrees so the rock n play would not violate their standards.
I also really feel for the families who lost their babies this way. What an unfathomable horror.
I'll have to research a safe alternative.
It’s a great product if you use it the way you’re supposed to...
Consumer Reports did an investigation and discovered 32 deaths, including some where the infant was less than 3 months old and died without rolling over.
> There is, for example, the mother in Hidalgo County, Texas, who placed her 2-month old daughter on her back for a night’s sleep on Oct. 19, 2013, according to a lawsuit filed by the family against Fisher-Price. At 4 a.m., when the mother checked, all was well, but by 7 a.m., the baby had stopped breathing. Her head was tilted to the side with her chin on her shoulder, compressing her airway. She was pronounced dead at the scene from positional asphyxia, or an inability to breathe caused by her position.
> The most recent deaths CR found occurred in spring 2018—one involving a 1-month-old girl in Knoxville, Tenn., and the other a 9-day-old boy in Copperas Cove, Texas.
There's another where a 7-week-old nearly died with their grandmother in the room, but thankfully she noticed the kid turning blue and lifeless and got him breathing again in time.
At this point I had to stop reading the article, it was upsetting me too much, but you can keep reading if you want to: https://www.consumerreports.org/recalls/fisher-price-rock-n-...
The same incline which is helping with the likely reflux, is also putting the neck in such a position that the windpipe can be collapsed.
[1] my wife, who's let me bend the AAP guidelines on everything but safe sleep.
( without first screaming until 4am)
Comparing the risk to driving a baby around in a car is a fallacy.
The product is badly designed: once the baby can turn over there is a risk of suffocation and the product does not allow for that (but it should).
A better comparison is to compare this product to the same product without the design faults, be that mesh fabric or whatever.
The American Academy of Pediatrics is clear: the only safe way to sleep is on a baby’s back, with no padding and on a flat surface. This product was never certified for safe sleep; Fisher-Price calls it a ‘sleeper’ instead of a regulated term like bassinet or crib to get around this fact.