Sell outs

I was sleepy when I read the pitch in my inbox.

A civil liberties group had announced it would oppose efforts to dismiss a case it brought against the Consumer Product Safety Commission, its former commissioner, and the Department of Health and Human Services for daring to educate retailers about the dangers to infants posed by weighted baby blankets.

It was looking for journalists to take an interest and talk with their attorneys.

In its case against the government agencies, The New Civil Liberties Alliance contends that the agencies have made “unproven, unlawful attacks on weighted infant sleep products, (specifically in respect to their client’s wearable sleep blanket that contains weighted beans) because the agency had not conducted enough research to pursue rulemaking about the specific products it was warning against.

Does it matter that in June of 2023, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) said in a letter to the CPSC that the weighted products should NEVER be used on babies? Or that years of study about sleep safety for infants have generally concluded that infants should not be put to bed with blankets, pillows, or stuffed toys because suffocation from these items is a known and provable danger to children under the age of one?

No. Because this lawsuit isn’t about the safety of products or the protection of infants. It's a result of jettisoning regulations and consumer protections. It’s about the liberties of an individual – in this particular case, the freedom of an entrepreneurial mom to sell their million-dollar idea to as many people as possible with the help of a retailer like Target.

It's about keeping the government from using any agency or expertise to make any recommendations whatsoever.

Because your pediatrician telling you to do something you are free to ignore is one thing, but government regulatory agencies taking the warnings to heart and altering the marketplace to the potential for harm is somehow a bridge too far? 

It takes time to gather data about dangerous products, many of which remain on store shelves for years while data about their harms accumulate, "new" and "improved" dangerous items come to market every day.

For instance, inclined infant sleepers with a pitch of more than 10 degrees from horizontal have been banned in the United States, but only after more than 100 infant deaths linked to their use during the course of 13 years.

The sale of weighted blankets for use on infants is a relatively new and worrisome phenomenon, but experts' understanding of their dangers is built on experience with similar products. This case, if it prevails, will conclude that agencies can't make. Each new product will be a lawsuit that reinvents the wheel.

For instance, doctors know that standard blankets and bedding can be deadly to sleeping infants. Given an infant's physiology, the risks posed by weighted bedding are a predictable likelihood.   

Each new blanket is a new court case waiting to happen thanks to the 2024 Supreme Court decision to end the Chevron Deference Doctrine, which allowed courts to defer to the expertise of regulatory agencies.

We can’t stop harm.

We don't know if we can limit dangerous guns, stop concealed carry of weapons, or curtail the creation of ghost guns. And yet we are contemplating the legalization of silencers and bumpstocks.

We can't even slow it down.

All we'll be able to do is conduct our own "research" from a new wave of dubious information.

And if these lawsuits prevail, we may find the true experts unable to warn others about the dangers. 

It feels like our eyes should be wide open now.