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or successfully confront some life-threatening respiratory challenges. ⁵ Indeed, the presence of a protective, committed, and responsive parent altogether proactively changes the infant’s physiological status, especially if breastfed, and hence the likely expression of certain inherent deficits potentially confronting an infant. ⁶

Indeed, we now know that breastfeeding lowers an infant’s chances of dying from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). ⁷ And if it is true, as a recent national survey indicates, that breastfeeding mothers are three times more likely to bedshare than bottle-feeding mothers, ⁸ safe bedsharing combined with breastfeeding could itself eventually be statistically shown to be protective.

Contrary to what has become a primary axiom of the safe-sleep campaigns of First Candle (a nonprofit SIDS activist group) and the AAP—i.e., that the presence of a mother sleeping next to her infant on the same surface automatically creates an “unsafe sleep environment”—this implausible generalization is powerfully argued against by human history and prehistory, as well as by contemporary cross-cultural SIDS studies documenting the low rates of SIDS among co-sleeping/breastfeeding/nonsmoking populations. And to assume, as some medical authorities do, that modifiable, specific adverse factors that can constitute the social and physical environment of bedsharing are irrelevant to understanding negative outcomes (where they occur) reflects a misreading of the available scientific data. Such a view indicates a tenacious, if not emotional, adherence to a social ideology, and not to any established set of scientific facts about the biology of mother-infant cosleeping. This ideology includes among its entrenched principles the notion that the promotion of safe cosleeping in the form of bedsharing is not worth investing in educationally, and that it is a practice of little or no positive worth or benefit that needs to be eradicated. Both positions are social judgments masquerading as science.

The information in our article is accurate and has been used in previously refer-eed articles. Indeed, we are not the only SIDS researchers to espouse this perspective. In a recent talk generally summarizing the overall meaning of several large epidemiological studies in the UK, respected SIDS epidemiologist Dr. Peter Blair states (as did we in different words) that “We cannot use simplistic labels saying bed sharing is safe or unsafe. We should be in the business of explaining to parents the specific circumstances where cosleeping should be avoided.” ⁹ We are pleased that this is precisely what we feel we accomplished in our article.

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