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.
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.
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.