Two decades ago, it was rare, but now in the United States 15 to 25 times a year, "An otherwise loving and attentive parent one day gets busy, or distracted, or upset, or confused by a change in his or her daily routine, and just... forgets a child is in the car." And it's a warm day -- and sometimes, not even that warm -- and tragedy strikes, with what doctors call "death by hyperthermia".
"What kind of person," asks Gene Weingarten in Sunday's Washington Post Magazine, "forgets a baby?"
The wealthy do, it turns out. And the poor, and the middle class. Parents of all ages and ethnicities do it. Mothers are just as likely to do it as fathers. It happens to the chronically absent-minded and to the fanatically organized, to the college-educated and to the marginally literate. In the last 10 years, it has happened to a dentist. A postal clerk. A social worker. A police officer. An accountant. A soldier. A paralegal. An electrician. A Protestant clergyman. A rabbinical student. A nurse. A construction worker. An assistant principal. It happened to a mental health counselor, a college professor and a pizza chef. It happened to a pediatrician. It happened to a rocket scientist.
"There may be no act of human failing that more fundamentally challenges our society's views about crime, punishment, justice and mercy," he writes, interviewing thirteen of these parents in an article that will simply blow you away. And even when I remind you that Weingarten deservedly won a Pulitzer for his 2007 article exploring what kind of attention world-renowned violinist Joshua Bell would receive playing in a Metro station (and why), you're still not going to be prepared for the way in which Weingarten's empathy for his subjects and multidisciplinary research will affect you.
There are, as I suggested, legal and policy aspects to this that Weingarten flags, mostly centering around the randomness of which parents are prosecuted for these deaths, and in which cases prosecutors recognize that a lifetime of personal guilt is enough. I do, however, also want to draw your attention to these passages:
Two decades ago, this was relatively rare. But in the early 1990s, car-safety experts declared that passenger-side front airbags could kill children, and they recommended that child seats be moved to the back of the car; then, for even more safety for the very young, that the baby seats be pivoted to face the rear. If few foresaw the tragic consequence of the lessened visibility of the child . . . well, who can blame them?
For years, [Janette Fennell of the nonprofit Kids and Cars] has been lobbying for a law requiring back-seat sensors in new cars, sensors that would sound an alarm if a child's weight remained in the seat after the ignition is turned off. Last year, she almost succeeded. The 2008 Cameron Gulbransen Kids' Transportation Safety Act -- which requires safety improvements in power windows and in rear visibility, and protections against a child accidentally setting a car in motion -- originally had a rear seat-sensor requirement, too. It never made the final bill; sponsors withdrew it, fearing they couldn't get it past a powerful auto manufacturers' lobby.
There are a few aftermarket products that alert a parent if a child remains in a car that has been turned off. These products are not huge sellers. They have likely run up against the same marketing problem that confronted three NASA engineers a few years ago.
In 2000, Chris Edwards, Terry Mack and Edward Modlin began to work on just such a product after one of their colleagues, Kevin Shelton, accidentally left his 9-month-old son to die in the parking lot of NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. The inventors patented a device with weight sensors and a keychain alarm. Based on aerospace technology, it was easy to use; it was relatively cheap, and it worked.
Janette Fennell had high hopes for this product: The dramatic narrative behind it, she felt, and the fact that it came from NASA, created a likelihood of widespread publicity and public acceptance.
That was five years ago. The device still isn't on the shelves. The inventors could not find a commercial partner willing to manufacture it. One big problem was liability. If you made it, you could face enormous lawsuits if it malfunctioned and a child died. But another big problem was psychological: Marketing studies suggested it wouldn't sell well.
The problem is this simple: People think this could never happen to them.
On a policy level, then, much of this loops back to Prof. Cass Sunstein's recent nomination to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, an executive-branch office with the mission of analyzing and coordinating federal regulation, and the use of cost-benefit analysis in assessing what sorts of safety regulations are most effective. In short, we need a regime that looks at all the secondary effects of whatever regulation is under consideration -- are we creating more risks than we're solving in mandating some approach to one problem? On the whole, are mandatory airbags worth it?
But mostly, after reading this article and Weingarten's revealing chat with readers today, you'll be left with profound admiration for Weingarten's too-rarely-displayed journalistic heft, and with a lot of questions about the quality of mercy in modern America.
In that chat, Weingarten answers why he wrote the article: "So it will happen less often. So when it does happen, the poor, decent, terribly damaged people to whom it happens are not demonized by an ignorant public."