What's Best For Baby? Co-Sleeping and The Politics of Inequality

What’s Best for Baby?
Co-Sleeping and the Politics of

Inequality
Laura Harrison
Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Volume 39, Number 3, 2018, pp. 63-95
(Article)
Published by University of Nebraska Press
For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/706775
Access provided at 21 Mar 2020 04:04 GMT from University of Queensland

What’s Best for Baby?
Co-Sleeping and the Politics of Inequality
Laura Harrison
“The average adult weighs roughly twenty times as much as a newborn baby.
That’s about the difference between your weight and the weight of an SUV.”
So intones a deep male voice in a radio spot titled “Rollover,” first aired in
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in June 2010. The ad continues in a direct address to
parents, advising them to engage in a brief experiment: those who believe
that it is safe to sleep in a bed with their baby should first ask friends to roll
an SUV (an “immovable object”) on top of them. Parents who would choose
not try this, the ad continues, are perhaps also smart enough to imagine how
a baby feels when being suffocated to death by a sleeping adult. If you love
your baby, the announcer concludes, you should know that there is no safer
place than in a crib: “It’s the best place to prevent a rollover accident—not
to mention, a funeral.”1 This chilling advertisement was one piece of a multi-
sited public health initiative called the Safe Sleep Campaign, launched by the
City of Milwaukee Health Department in 2009.2
I will return to this particular promotion shortly, but as this brief
introduction suggests, the goal of the Safe Sleep Campaign is to eliminate a
practice known as bed-sharing, or co-sleeping. Bed-sharing usually refers to
a parent sleeping in the same bed with an infant. More broadly, bed-sharing
can refer to sharing any sleep surface with a newborn, such as a couch or
an armchair, or sleep surfaces shared between infants and siblings or other
caretakers.3 Milwaukee’s campaign aims at eliminating bed-sharing because
of associations between this practice and infant death due to Sudden Infant
Death Syndrome (SIDS) or accidental suffocation, as mentioned in the
Rollover radio piece.4 A death is attributed to SIDS if it occurs in an infant
under the age of one and is unexpected or unexplained, even after a thorough
investigation, a complete autopsy, and a review of the clinical history.5
When it comes to the topic of bed-sharing or co-sleeping, most people
would agree that the goal of lowering infant mortality rates is a worthy one,
particularly when the aim is to reduce the kind of drastic racial disparities in
health that exist in Milwaukee. Infant mortality rates for African American
babies in Milwaukee are 2.5 times higher than for white babies, and disparities
also exist for Hispanic and other racial and ethnic minorities. Bed-sharing
within communities of color is cast as a social problem, and Milwaukee’s cam-
paign vilifies this practice and those who engage in it, particularly targeting
communities of color. Building on the work of anthropologist Shellee Colen,6
feminist theorists Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp discuss “stratified repro-
duction,” or a system in which certain groups of people are empowered to re-
produce and to parent, while others are disempowered and constrained along
lines of race, class, nationality, and sexuality.7 Public policy, cultural ideolo-
gies, and political representations are all components of stratified reproduc-
tion, including racialized images of motherhood that pathologize parents of
color as bad choice makers.8
As Barbara Gurr explains in her analysis of reproductive justice within
Native American communities, all women experience institutionalized
oppression, but particular groups of women (women of color, poor women)
bear the burden in specific ways. These experiences do not stem solely from
individual choices, as the anti-bed-sharing paradigm would suggest, but
rather “they are structurally produced, and they are produced along different
axes of identity and social location.”9 Likewise, feminist theorist Laury Oaks
follows criminal justice scholars in arguing that certain public policies serve
as “crime control theater” (including Safe Haven Laws and Amber Alerts),
in which an infrequent but thorny social problem results in a reactionary
public response that gives the appearance of crime control, if not the effect.10
The response to SIDS deaths in Milwaukee is strikingly similar in that anti-
co-sleeping campaigns take aim at an implicitly racialized and class-based
stereotype of “bad parents” without addressing the much more pervasive and
structural factors that lead to infant mortality.
I argue that Milwaukee’s Safe Sleep campaign makes assumptions about the
kind of parenting advice that can be followed by the communities it targets
(primarily communities of color), assuming that abolishing all forms of bed-
sharing is the most feasible way to minimize infant death. The strategies
employed by the City of Milwaukee are reflective of risk elimination, or the
attempt to eradicate what is defined as “risky” behavior (bed-sharing) in its
entirety.11 This approach conflicts with the “risk management” strategies
proposed by grassroots activists in the area, who have developed tools in
conjunction with the community to teach parents how to co-sleep safely.
64 Frontiers/2018/Vol. 39, No. 3

Milwaukee’s Safe Sleep initiative is flawed in that it holds individuals
responsible for the problem of infant mortality that is rooted in deep,
system-wide inequalities based on race and class. This campaign relies on
a neoliberal approach to public health, placing the blame for bed-sharing
deaths on the “private” family unit. It does so at the expense of recognizing
the systemic forces that lead to the kind of massive racial disparities reflected
by infant mortality rates in Milwaukee.12 Such programs are part of “the
neoliberal trend toward privatization and punitive governance,” which “place
reproductive responsibility on women, thus privatizing remedies for illness
and social inequality.”13 An analysis of the Safe Sleep Campaign is important
because the campaign, while well intentioned, is reflective of the broader
erosion of women’s reproductive and parenting autonomy at the statewide
and national level. The Safe Sleep Campaign is embedded within institutions
(of government, medicine, law, and popular media) that assume that mothers,
and particularly marginalized mothers, require state intervention to ensure
that children are protected from their parents.14
While anti-co-sleeping campaigns do not yet criminalize bed-sharing,
politicians in the state of Wisconsin are making moves to do so, as I will
discuss further. Moreover, these campaigns utilize a striking message that
foregrounds the ultimate innocent victim (a sleeping newborn) and imply
that individual parents are capable of “solving” the seemingly intractable
problem of infant mortality. At the same time, the lack of nuance or depth to
anti-bed-sharing messages suggests that the targeted parents are not capable
of following more complex messages about bed-sharing, like how to do so
safely. Instead, parenting decisions by poor parents and parents of color are
not even framed as choices or decisions, but rather as tradition, instinct, or
even worse, recklessness and selfishness.15
My critique of Milwaukee’s Safe Sleep Campaign is framed through the
lens of reproductive justice. Beginning in the 1960s Chicana and black women
activists were organizing around limitations on the childbearing and parent-
ing of women of color.16 The contemporary reproductive justice movement
was informed by this history and launched by women of color in the mid-
1990s. The organization Sistersong, co-founded by black women’s rights ac-
tivist Loretta Ross, defines reproductive justice as “the right to have children,
not have children, and to parent the children we have in safe and healthy envi-
ronments.”17 As this quote suggests, reproductive justice advocates expand the
definition of reproductive rights beyond the abortion debate, with the goal of
broadening mainstream definitions of reproductive rights through an inter-
sectional framework of social justice.18 They contend that for many women,
the right to become pregnant and raise healthy children free from violence
Harrison: Co-Sleeping and Inequality 65

is as pressing an issue as the right to terminate a pregnancy.19 A reproductive
justice approach moves beyond the limiting framework of “choice,” instead
foregrounding human rights, social justice, and the question of access to crit-
ical health services.20 Through this lens, reproductive politics are inseparable
from issues such as economic inequality, racism, and health inequality more
broadly;21 as such, this essay examines how parents of color are scapegoated
for problems that are deeply embedded in unequal institutional practices. A
feminist reproductive justice approach is central to this project because it de-
mands that the goals and needs of communities of color are brought from the
margins to the center of public health debates.
Bed- Sharing, Co- Sleeping, and Attachment Parenting

While Milwaukee’s Safe Sleep Campaign included radio and television spots,
billboards, bus shelter ads, and outdoor demonstrations, the Rollover public
service announcement is a good place to start because it introduces many of
the hallmarks of the campaign that invite critique. First, it mistakenly focuses
on bed-sharing as a primary cause of infant mortality in Milwaukee. Second,
with its direct address to the parent, the Rollover ad places responsibility for
infant mortality squarely in the lap—or shall we say the beds—of individual
family units. This radio spot asks new mothers and fathers to view themselves
as a potential deadly force in the lives of their fragile newborns, posing a grave
threat to a helpless child.22 A mother who shares a bed with her child is com-
pared to an SUV, a non-sentient, unfeeling, “immovable object” that could
unknowingly crush her child at any time. This comparison is obviously drawn
in part for shock value, to frighten parents into complying with the advice
given by the health department. Yet it also situates poor parental choice mak-
ing as the root cause of bed-sharing deaths, independent from other risk fac-
tors. Rather than positioning parents as partners in reducing infant mortality
(which would be central to a reproductive justice approach), this radio ad sit-
uates bed-sharing parents as perpetrators of reckless child endangerment.
After listening to this PSA, one might reasonably deduce that bed-sharing
is universally regarded as a dangerous practice, with parenting literature
warning all new mothers and fathers of the risks in equally frightening terms.
Yet even a brief foray into any bookstore’s parenting advice section would
quickly disabuse one of that notion. Indeed, bed-sharing is at the forefront of
advice from the father of the child-rearing philosophy known as “attachment
parenting,” well-known pediatrician Dr. William Sears. Sears is the author of
many of the highest selling parenting books on the market, with titles as au-

thoritative as The Baby Book.23 This text (described on Amazon.com as a “mil-
lion copy bestseller”) and his others name co-sleeping among the three key
criteria to instill attachment and bonding between parent and infant. While
multiple terms are often used interchangeably in literature regarding shared
sleep surfaces, Sears states a preference for the term “sharing sleep” in The
Baby Book. He acknowledges that co-sleeping is the most popular term, but
says that it “sounds like something adults do,”24 while bed-sharing “appears in
medical writings.”25 Attachment parenting is premised on theories from the
field of psychology, which contend that a sense of secure attachment is crucial
for the emotional well-being and development of infants. Attachment parent-
ing builds beyond this research, arguing that secure attachment is achieved
through specific practices by parents (primarily mothers).26 The most import-
ant of these are exclusive breastfeeding, baby wearing (carrying a child in a
sling attached to the body whenever possible), and sharing a family bed, or
co-sleeping.
There are several interesting features of attachment parenting as it relates
to Milwaukee’s Safe Sleep Campaign: first, attachment parenting is largely
viewed as a white middle- and upper-class phenomenon. When Time mag-
azine led with a story on this parenting philosophy in 2012, the controversial
cover pictured a young, conventionally attractive white mother staring defi-
antly at the camera while her three-year-old son breastfed, standing on a chair
in order to reach her chest.27 This deviation from the standard Madonna and
Child pose was paired with the text, “Are You Mom Enough?”28 The play on
the question “Are you man enough?” situates attachment parenting as femi-
nized, yet competitive, and a measuring stick for maternal dedication. Indeed,
the recommendations of attachment parenting require intensive investments
in time, physical contact, and work flexibility that are often out of reach for
many dual-income, working families. Despite this, the Time article argues that
the message of attachment parenting, that babies and mothers have evolved to
be close to one another, has saturated the cultural consciousness.
This representation of cultural consensus mirrors how many other domi-
nant belief systems operate. For example, even if women in the United States
choose not to follow dominant beauty standards by dieting, wearing makeup,
or getting plastic surgery, they know that they are being judged against ex-
pectations built on photoshopped, airbrushed, and skin-lightened media cre-
ations.29 The same is true of parenting—women may not be able to afford an
unpaid maternity leave, or be in a workplace that supports the demands of
pumping and storing breast milk when (or if) they return, but they are still
aware of the unachievable expectations of ideal, or what Sharon Hays terms

“intensive,” motherhood.30 Mothers who have never even heard of attachment
parenting are probably familiar with some of its core practices, which may in-
form their own decision to breastfeed or to share a bed. Many cultural critics,
such as Emily Matchar, author of Homeward Bound: Why Women are Em-
bracing the New Domesticity, agree. Matchar argues that attachment parenting
has become the dominant parenting philosophy in many parts of the United
States in the early twenty-first century and that the aforementioned core con-
cepts (exclusive breastfeeding, co-sleeping, and baby wearing) have become
“common sense” for new parents, even those who do not identify as “attach-
ment parents.”31
This is not to suggest that attachment parents who co-sleep are immune
from criticism. Debates over the safety and effects of co-sleeping emerge on
mommy blogs and social media and may be raised when parents confer with
their own pediatricians. Sears himself briefly addresses the controversy sur-
rounding co-sleeping in The Baby Book. After asking his readers (rhetorically,
of course) whether it is acceptable to let your baby sleep in your bed, Dr. Sears
responds with an emphatic “yes!” Sears reports that he and his wife and co-
author, Martha, are shocked at how many baby books dissuade parents from
sharing a bed, asking, “Are they also against motherhood and apple pie?”32
When discussing co-sleeping, Sears uses concepts like “decision,” “mindset,”
“style,” and “approach,” situating co-sleeping as a positive choice that parents
are making based on their beliefs about what is best for their baby.33 Yet bed-
sharing is described by Milwaukee’s campaign as irresponsible at best, and
life-threateningly dangerous at worst. While Sears describes mothers who co-
sleep as “in nighttime harmony” with their babies,34 conservative Milwaukee
radio host and “shock jock” Mark Belling blames infant deaths in Milwaukee
on “the pigs of mothers who are too lazy to put their children in a crib.”35
On the one hand, we have Milwaukee’s Safe Sleep Campaign threatening
parents who bed-share with responsibility for their child’s death, while on
the other hand, countless middle-class moms have copies of The Baby Book
pressed into their hands by attachment parenting evangelists, and a wide
range of parents receive some of this “wisdom” as it trickles down through
the popular consciousness. The purpose in contrasting attachment parenting
with the discussion of bed-sharing is not to advocate for or against this par-
enting philosophy but to demonstrate that these radically different responses
are based in far more than a difference in opinion on parenting—they reflect
powerful, historically significant, and systemic assumptions about race, class,
health, and parenting.

Race, Class, and Health Inequality in Milwaukee
While safe sleep is an issue that is applicable to all racial groups, the City of
Milwaukee’s Safe Sleep Campaign particularly targets African American
parents. This is clear in the imagery used by the campaign—three of the five
images of babies on campaign billboards can be read as African American—as
well as official campaign goals set to lower infant mortality among
communities of color. The Health Department’s target is to reduce African
American infant mortality to 12 deaths per 1,000 births by 2017.36 The city
specifies black infant mortality because racial disparities in mortality between
African American and white infants are among the worst in the nation.37
As of 2009 the infant mortality rate in Milwaukee for white babies was 5.4
deaths per 1,000 live births, while the rate for African American babies was
14.1 deaths per 1,000 live births.38 While infant death rates for Hispanics are
also higher than those for white infants, the city did not set specific goals for
other minority groups because, according to the health commissioner, the
city needed to focus on “the toughest neighborhoods where the problem is
worst. . . . We’re not going to leave anyone out, but we have to focus on where
the problem is.”39
In order to understand this logic, it is useful to know more about the
demographics of the region. According to the US Census Bureau, as of
2010 African Americans made up 40 percent of the residents of Milwaukee,
nearly equal to the number of white residents (44 percent), and significantly
higher than the next minority group, Hispanic or Latino (17.3 percent). The
relatively high percentage of African Americans in Milwaukee is significant
in comparison to the proportion of black people in the state of Wisconsin
as a whole, which is only 6.3 percent.40 African Americans in Wisconsin are
concentrated in Milwaukee, and racial disparities are reflected in economics,
segregation, incarceration, health care, and education.41
A recent National Public Radio segment titled “Why Is Milwaukee So Bad
for Black People?” described the state as, statistically, “one of the worst places
in the country for African Americans to reside.”42 These statistics include the
fact that Wisconsin high schools suspend black students at the highest rate
in the nation,43 and that in recent years national test scores reveal the largest
achievement gap between black and white students in the country.44 These are
alarming pieces of data given what some researchers and social justice activists
have termed the “school-to-prison pipeline.”45 Segregation is a major factor
contributing to Milwaukee’s racial disparities. A 2014 post on the Atlantic’s
website measured the segregation of poverty using census information on

over 350 US cities and found that Milwaukee has the highest level of poverty
segregation of all the metro areas (cities with a population of one million or
more) that were measured.46
Poverty segregation is also tied to the issue of housing discrimination,
which is deeply embedded in the historical marginalization of black
communities. The Federal Housing Administration, signed into law by
Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1934, introduced the practice of “redlining.” African
American communities were marked off on the map by literal red lines that
indicated to banks the areas in which they could not lend, as determined by
federal housing authorities.47 In conjunction with employment discrimination,
Milwaukee’s segregationist housing practices of the early twentieth century
concentrated black families into certain urban neighborhoods, while white
residents moved to the suburbs. Indeed, “by 1990, Black Milwaukeeans
overwhelmingly lived in the same inner city neighborhood areas that had
been decisively designated for their grandparents and great grandparents 70
years earlier.”48 Segregation also impacts health outcomes; as contemporary
public health research demonstrates, the continued segregation and economic
inequality experienced by people of color in the United States is directly tied
to poor health and has been historically so. Communities of color are less
likely to connect to what is termed the “prosperity grid” or “the network of
institutions and resources that make prosperity possible,” including freedom
from environmental toxins, good schools, health care, safe neighborhoods,
healthy food, and family services.49 Children are particularly hard hit by these
trends; four out of five African American children in the state of Wisconsin
are reported to live in poverty.50
The city also fares poorly on measures of children’s health. Access to prena-
tal care (a contributing factor in healthy birth weight) is stratified along lines
of race in Milwaukee. More than twice as many black women in the city re-
ceive no prenatal care than the number of white and Hispanic women com-
bined, and the absence of prenatal care increases the risk of infant death for
children in Milwaukee by 6.5 times.51 The majority of these infant deaths are
due to complications of prematurity.52 According to the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention (CDC), risk factors for premature birth include a
mother’s age, race, and poverty level, with black women, very young or older
women, and poor women at highest risk. Stress, lack of prenatal care, long
working hours, and environmental conditions—all deeply racialized struc-
tural factors—also lead to premature birth (and some birth defects).53
Stress itself is both a gendered and racialized factor impacting the health
outcomes of pregnancy; women who are heavily burdened by stress due to the
lived experience of gendered racism may be more likely to experience nega-

tive pregnancy outcomes.54 These data support my assertion that the problem
of infant death in Milwaukee is undeniably a racialized and structural one.
Race is about more than skin color; it is also about how inequality and dif-
ference are experienced within economic and political systems.55 While these
sobering statistics on infant mortality are well-known, and many are cited
on the Milwaukee Health Department’s Safe Sleep website, it is not the direct
elimination of these factors that is the focus of the Safe Sleep Campaign—
instead, the emphasis is on changing the sleep behavior of individual families.
This neoliberal approach to public health is not new, but rather a continuation
of medical approaches to health in America that have held marginalized com-
munities responsible for illness, disease, and death.56
Bed- Sharing and Child Safety

The push to end bed-sharing is coming not only from the city’s health
department but also from its administration; Milwaukee Mayor Tom
Barrett describes the problem as “embarrassing” and “frustrating,” with
“neighborhoods in the city where the infant mortality rate is higher than
it is in some third world countries.”57 The health department reports that
between 2006 and 2009 there were 89 infant deaths related to SIDS or
accidental suffocation.58 The city’s Safe Sleep website also states that in half
of these deaths, infants were sleeping in an adult bed, which is considered
an unsafe sleep environment.59 In a safe sleep environment, as defined by
the American Academy of Pediatricians, a child sleeps alone, on the back,
in a crib, with no blankets, pillows, or toys. Any deviation constitutes unsafe
sleep.60 The city reports that most infant deaths involve multiple risk factors,
with the most common being the presence of bedding, pillows, or other soft
items in the sleep area. Additional risk factors including sleep position of the
infant (stomach or side), sleeping with another adult or child, and exposure
to cigarette smoke. The city also finds that over half of infants who die in an
unsafe sleep environment were born prematurely, suggesting a link between
prematurity and infant vulnerability to bed-sharing deaths.61
It is in part these multiple risk factors that lead to debates about the relative
safety or risk associated with bed-sharing. Various factions debate how to de-
termine a SIDS death, what counts as an unsafe sleep environment, and even
which infant deaths should be attributed to bed-sharing. What many pro-
ponents of co-sleeping argue is that bed-sharing is not an independent risk
factor for SIDS, and thus should not be the primary focus of infant mortal-
ity campaigns. In other words, they argue, bed-sharing has to co-occur with
other “risky” behaviors or conditions—such as smoking, drug and alcohol

use, or prematurity—to pose a measurable risk to infants. Parental drug and
alcohol use can be a factor in bed-sharing deaths, potentially increasing the
likelihood of “overlay,” or a sleeping parent rolling over upon and suffocat-
ing an infant.62 For example, in a study of infant deaths in Alaska, researchers
found that 13 percent of deaths occurred while bed-sharing, but 99 percent of
those had at least one associated risk factor, primarily maternal tobacco use
or sleeping with an impaired person. The authors concluded that the most
effective way to lower infant mortality is to focus on risk factors for babies
in any sleep environment—especially parental substance use and infant sleep
position.63 While parental drug or alcohol use is likely to garner the most at-
tention because it taps into the discourse of reckless or careless parenting, the
Milwaukee Health Department notes that from 2005 to 2008, fewer than 18
percent of caregivers of infants who died in bed-sharing deaths were using
drugs or alcohol at the time of the incident. In contrast, 68 percent of those
infants were exposed to second-hand smoke.64
Other co-sleeping proponents argue that the United States is in fact a
cultural anomaly in its negative attitude toward co-sleeping, in part due to
culturally specific beliefs about privacy, sex, and marital intimacy. Some tout
the benefits of bed-sharing for infants, such as increased arousal (meaning
wakefulness), and ease of breastfeeding, both of which are believed to reduce
SIDS rates.65 Yet most proponents of co-sleeping do not deny that sharing a
bed can correlate with infant mortality. Rather, they clarify that evidence of
co-sleeping is not always causally linked to infant mortality. Despite this, the
two are often conflated: when a deceased infant is discovered in an adult bed,
the media often attributes the death to co-sleeping, even when the cause of
death was not related to the sleep surface.
The potentially tragic consequences of this slippage can be found in the
2009 story of a six-week-old Milwaukee infant who was found dead in her
mother’s bed on Christmas morning. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel at-
tributed the child’s death to co-sleeping, and presented it as evidence that
the message about safe sleep was not getting through to parents, effectively
holding the mother responsible for her child’s death.66 In an interview on
a Milwaukee-based Fox news program, Dr. Patricia McManus of the Black
Health Coalition of Wisconsin stated that the mother was temporarily insti-
tutionalized in a psychiatric hospital after her name was made public by the
press. Weeks later, medical reports concluded that the child’s death was not
related to sharing a bed, but the woman’s life had already been irrevocably
impacted by the public response, in addition to the terrible loss of a child.67
While demographic information about the race or socioeconomic status of

the family was not available, Dr. McManus stated in the same interview that
her organization typically works with low-income people and people of color.
The response to parents accused of causing bed-sharing deaths is reminis-
cent of what feminist theorist Anna Tsing has called “monster stories,” which
“advise women of a new public agenda in which children, like fetuses, must be
saved from their own mothers.”68 Tsing studied women in the US who were
charged with jeopardizing the lives of their newborns by giving birth unas-
sisted, and found that the image of the endangered newborn taps into other
discourses like anti-abortion rhetoric and fetal and child protection (and
more recently, I would add, the discourse of fetal personhood). In Reproduc-
ing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy as a Site of Racialization, an insightful
ethnography of race and pregnancy in a New York City hospital, anthropol-
ogist Khiara Bridges likewise argues that low-income pregnant women are
frequently situated as “unruly bodies” or “biological dangers within the body
politic.”69 Black parents in Milwaukee are similarly viewed as a problem popu-
lation whose embodied parenting practices threaten child safety. Through the
lens of the Safe Sleep Campaign, the “unruly” mother is either ignorant of safe
sleep guidelines or is unwilling to comply with them, and thus continues to
rely upon her own beliefs about parenting rather than acquiescing to medical
authority. Moreover, the risk elimination approach favored by the health de-
partment takes “safe” bed-sharing off the table, whether due to the belief that
bed-sharing can never be done safely or that parents who bed-share cannot
or will not be properly educated on how to do so. As an analysis of campaign
materials demonstrates, the Safe Sleep Campaign employs the image of the
endangered newborn in particular to posit careless parents as the menacing
threat to children’s health.
Tombstones, Knives, and Guerilla Warfare

The City of Milwaukee Health Department employed Serve Marketing to cre-
ate advertising materials for the campaign; Serve is a nonprofit, all-volunteer
advertising agency that was founded by a Milwaukee marketer. Serve de-
scribes its work as “provocative” and “controversial,” noting on its website that
the Milwaukee anti-bed sharing campaign “drew the ire” of an unnamed local
health group.70 Serve has done other work in Milwaukee, including billboards
featuring bare-chested and shame-faced pregnant boys (including young men
of color) with the tagline, “It shouldn’t be any less disturbing when it’s a girl.
Teen pregnancy. Stop ignoring it.”71 Serve has also created campaigns about
shaken baby syndrome, sexting, statutory rape, child sex abuse, and teen
homelessness.72

The Safe Sleep advertising campaign included radio and television spots
as well as public service announcements placed on billboards and bus
shelters around the city. Between 2010 and 2012 the city ran the “Tombstone,”
and “Knife” PSAs on billboards and transit shelters in locations including
addresses in west and south Milwaukee, and nearby Greenfield and West Allis
(part of the metro area).73 The “Tombstone” ads were the first to be rolled
out in 2010. They depict an adult bed with rumpled blankets and two pillows
(marking it as an unsafe sleep environment), with the headboard replaced by
a tombstone. The tombstone reads: “For too many babies last year, this was
their final resting place.” Additional language on the image warns, “Think
twice before sleeping with your baby. The safest place is in a crib.”74 While
this PSA does direct readers to the City’s Safe Sleep website, the message itself
does not provide instructions for creating a safe sleep environment beyond
the location (a crib), and does not indicate what aspects of bed-sharing
may create risk, or how to mediate these risks. Again, many of the factors
that contribute to infant death are tied to issues of poverty and poor health
(including prematurity in infants and exposure to second-hand smoke). This
ad places full responsibility for preventing infant death on individual parents.
Moreover, by urging parents to “think twice,” the messaging insinuates that
co-sleeping is not the result of a parenting decision or philosophy but rather
reflects a lack of foresight.
A neoliberal approach such as this distracts from dismantling social struc-
tural factors such as barriers to health services including prenatal care, hous-
ing discrimination, affordable child care, and other forms of institutionalized
racism. It treats health outcomes as a result of “lifestyle” issues; the effects
are then conceptualized as matters of personal choices, with individual solu-
tions.75 When health outcomes are viewed through “lifestyle explanatory par-
adigms,” beliefs or behaviors that are deemed problematic are attributed to the
lifestyle of racial or cultural groups, independent from larger social forces.76
This focus on individual responsibility blames the victims and personalizes
political issues. It ignores social factors like systematic inequality that make
it almost impossible for members of some groups to take control of the fac-
tors that cause problems like infant mortality.77 By privatizing health out-
comes, this tactic diverts attention away from state responsibility for social
conditions.
A neoliberal approach also sets up the state and the targeted community as
if they are in opposition to one another, rather than potential partners with a
shared goal of creating a healthy community. The assumption behind this ad
campaign is that communities who bed-share must be made to comply with
public health guidelines by utilizing guilt, fear, and the imposition of a unitary

standard of “good parenting.” This stands in contrast to alternative approaches
that would utilize a reproductive justice perspective, such as seeking input
about how local parents are bed-sharing (sharing a “family bed” versus falling
asleep with a child on the couch, for example), motivations for bed-sharing,
and mobilizing community support for raising awareness of potential risks.
In an illustration of the city’s approach, Milwaukee’s Health Commissioner
Bevan Baker describes the controversial billboard PSAs as a set of “guerilla
tactics” to combat infant mortality; militarized language such as this suggests
that the City of Milwaukee is at war with a certain segment of its residents.78
A similar “us versus them” rhetoric is employed in another component of
the Safe Sleep Campaign, an installation effort in which thirty-six mattresses
and two couches were placed along the meridian of Sherman Boulevard and
Capitol Drive, an in intersection that is located in a low-income area of north-
western Milwaukee. The mattresses contained orange outlines of babies, with
provocative phrases like: “Imagine how many babies would still be alive if
they’d slept in a crib?” and “Babies who sleep here don’t always wake up.”79
The outline of the babies is reminiscent of the outline of a corpse at a crime
scene, an image familiar to the public from crime drama and movies, where it
is usually employed to signify that a murder has been committed. To viewers
of these images today, the orange outlines might bring up more recent asso-
ciations with the bodies of actual black men and boys lying in the streets, vic-
tims of police violence, and the social justice movements that have arisen in
response, such as Black Lives Matter.
In addition to the shape, the color orange also symbolizes caution, dan-
ger, and crime. The way that these images link the tragic death of an infant
with crime, and even murder, situates the parents or caregivers as perpetra-
tors of the crime rather than as potential partners in reducing risk. Moving
mattresses and couches—pieces of indoor furniture—outdoors and into the
streets is also jarring and attention-grabbing, suggesting public surveillance
of what typically remains within the allegedly private sphere. In other words,
this juxtaposition of intimate home furnishings with the street, which is in
many ways an emblem of public space, suggests the permeability of the sup-
posedly private sphere in the name of child safety. Milwaukee Alderman Wil-
lie Wade told the press that the installation was meant to be “in their faces”
[they presumably being parents], adding, “we don’t want them to have the ex-
cuse that they didn’t know.”80 Yet again, the combination of this language and
the imagery of the campaign positions parents and city officials in opposition
to one another, as if the targeted parents are reluctant or unwilling to protect
their children.
Perhaps even more shocking are the “Knife” ads, released in 2011. These

two advertisements depict a white and African American baby, respec-
tively, each dressed only in a diaper and lying in a purportedly unsafe sleep
environment—they are in what appear to be adult beds, surrounded by loose
bedding, and in unsafe sleep positions (one on his stomach, the other on
his side). Most conspicuously, of course, both babies are lying next to what
can only be described as a butcher knife or a meat cleaver. The main text of
each ad reads, “Your baby sleeping with you can be just as dangerous.”81 The
wording—“Your baby sleeping with you”—posits bed-sharing itself as unsafe,
yet the visual represents multiple risk factors for suffocation and SIDS beyond
a shared bed (both sleep position and presence of loose, soft bedding). Cre-
ating a false equivalency between the alleged dangers of bed-sharing and the
undeniable dangers of a knife adjacent to a newborn rhetorically criminalizes
a very common practice, thus construing any “guilty” viewers as bad parents.
And yet, where exactly are the parents in this advertisement? This explicit
imagery—a helpless infant sleeping face down next to a deadly weapon—is
glaringly missing a key actor in the bed-sharing blame game, namely the sup-
posedly irresponsible parent who is sharing the bed with her child and put-
ting the child’s life at risk. The absence of the parent makes the image more
frightening, and takes parenting (as a verb, a thing that we do) literally out
of the picture. The children in these ads are abandoned to their grim fates,
not sleeping in a bed with parents who have consciously chosen to put them
there. In addition, the knife stands in for and symbolizes the physical embodi-
ment of the parent—perhaps even more explicitly than in the “Rollover” radio
spot, this PSA positions the parent as deadly to the child.
It is important to note that roughly 80 percent of infant mortality in
Milwaukee is due to a combination of prematurity and birth defects, both
issues that are linked to poverty and inadequate health care.82 The mother-
blame inherent to these public service announcements distracts from
institutional responsibility. While Milwaukee’s campaign is purportedly
gender-neutral in its targeting of parents, it is mothers whom our society
ultimately holds responsible for the well-being of children, particularly
of infants.83 As the feminist scholar Laura Briggs argues, in the last several
decades parenting (and, I would specify, mothering), has increasingly been
framed as something “easy to get wrong,” as reflected in the emergence of
new fears about vaccination, childhood disability, harm, and death. Where
problems like childhood disease, accidents, and even SIDS were once
construed as senseless tragedies, sympathy is increasingly replaced by blame,
casting mothers as criminals and children as victims.84 Safety is also frequently
marketed as a commodity that can be purchased by vigilant parents. Parents
receive the message that their newborns are fragile and endangered through

advertising for products like “smart socks” that purport to alert parents
if their newborn has stopped breathing during the night, hospital-grade
pulse oximeters to measure baby’s blood oxygen level at home, and remote
monitoring of baby’s vitals via smart phone apps. Whether these tools offer
any measurable increase in safety, or merely the sense of risk management,
is entirely debatable. However, it is important to note that even this sense of
security is stratified by class, with low-income parents often priced out of
access to high-tech monitoring systems, or even brand new (and thus smoke-
free) cribs and bedding.
Milwaukee’s campaign does attempt to address the issue of cost as it per-
tains to infant sleep surfaces. The small print on the “Knife” ad reads, “Babies
can die when sleeping in adult beds. Always put your baby to sleep on his
back, in a crib,” followed by a number to call for a Pack ’n Play (a portable
bassinet). While this ad does provide a potential solution to bed-sharing for
parents who cannot afford a crib for their child, there are still issues with this
approach. For one, in order to receive a crib, parents must contact the organi-
zation Cribs for Kids, for which Milwaukee became a site in 2009.85 Cribs for
Kids, which is offered in 250 communities across 47 states, is itself no stranger
to controversy; the same program was behind controversial billboard adver-
tising in low-income neighborhoods in Pittsburgh. The Pittsburgh ads showed
a hearse carrying a miniature coffin, with the words, “Your baby belongs in a
crib, not a casket.”86 The executive director of the program explained that in
order to get the message across, “We thought maybe we have to hit them right
between the eyes,” again relying on metaphors of a violent and combative rela-
tionship between parents and those promoting safe sleep.87 Milwaukee’s Cribs
for Kids program provides free Pack ’n Plays to families who can’t afford cribs,
and the City reports that it has provided a Pack ’n Play, fitted crib sheet, and
Halo sleep sack (a wearable infant blanket) to about one thousand families a
year since the program’s inception. In order to receive these benefits, the fam-
ily must attend a one-hour appointment at a Milwaukee Health Department
clinic location at which a public health educator provides them with safe sleep
materials and education, and they must also agree to a follow-up phone call to
answer questions and reinforce the material.88
Barriers to Safe Sleep Success

While the goals of this direct service initiative are laudable, further research is
necessary to determine whether the requirements create barriers for margin-
alized communities. First, families must expose themselves to potential state
intervention in order to receive this benefit. Requiring individuals to come

into contact with potential agents of the state as a prerequisite for assistance
creates barriers for communities that are already over-surveilled and over-
policed.89 The feminist legal theorist Dorothy Roberts notes that children of
color are routinely removed from their homes for reasons including inade-
quate housing, which may make parents hesitant to acknowledge that they
lack basic provisions for childcare or to come into additional contact with
mandatory reporters.90
Second, while free cribs are a positive resource to offer low-income com-
munities, it is questionable whether they achieve the goal of reducing SIDS
and suffocation deaths. The Cribs for Kids website says the program “provides
Milwaukee families with Pack ’n Plays to help reduce deaths due to Sudden
Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) and unsafe sleep.”91 This statement assumes
that parents would not bed-share if alternative sleep surfaces (like cribs) were
available, which is not consistently supported by research.92 A Canadian study
published in 2008 analyzed questionnaires submitted by 293 “highly edu-
cated” mothers concerning their sleep practices; over 70 percent of parents
reported bed-sharing on a regular or occasional basis, with 88 percent stating
that they knew there were some risks associated with the practice. The au-
thors report that their findings are similar to a US study that found 76 per-
cent bed-sharing rates, and a British study that reported a 65 percent rate
of bed-sharing.93 As critics of Milwaukee’s Safe Sleep Campaign have noted,
deaths attributed to bed-sharing in Milwaukee have also continued to occur
in rooms that contained an unused Pack ’n Play or crib.94
Finally, some research studies have suggested that while bed-sharing is
common across lines of race and ethnicity, some communities of color bed-
share more consistently than do white parents, and for reasons that are not
tied to socioeconomic status. A large population-based study of mothers in
Oregon found that over 40 percent of black and Hispanic mothers reported
that they “always” co-slept with their infants. Rates of co-sleeping did not
change significantly with income level among black and Hispanic mothers as
it did with some other ethnic groups (including white mothers). The authors
concluded that programs that give away free cribs might lack efficacy if most
women are bed-sharing for reasons other than a lack of space.95
“Culture” has also been used in the bed-sharing debates as a thinly veiled
means to critique the parenting of communities of color. The parenting prac-
tices and “traditions” of people of color and ethnic minorities in the US have
frequently been viewed with skepticism, as “Other” that the standard or norm
of white parenting.96 Another of the radio spots in the Safe Sleep Campaign
explicitly identifies “tradition” (often a synonym for cultural difference or
backwardness) as a misguided and dangerous justification for bed-sharing,

declaring, “If you think sharing a bed with your baby is simply a nice fam-
ily tradition, a way to feel a special bond with your newborn, well, we’ve got
some news for you. The safest place for a baby is always in a crib.”97 Culture is
often used to explain health disparities ranging from cardiovascular disease
to HIV/AIDS, and using it thus can reify racial difference and obscure the
effects of racism and structural inequality.98 Scholars of public health parallel
how the “lifestyle” and behavior of marginalized groups are used to explain
problems like infant mortality with the resurgence of biological determinism
in the form of the geneticization of disease. Both downplay the social con-
struction of race and reinforce the role of personal responsibility for health.99
The explanation for racial disparities is tied to the behavior of the group it
most visibly affects (in this case, African American babies and parents), ob-
scuring social relations of race and how whiteness protects and advantages
other families.100
An example can be found in a local Fox News investigative report in
January 2015 on bed-sharing deaths in Milwaukee, which was tellingly
headlined “Culture vs. Calamity.” The title invokes the racialized narrative of a
“culture of poverty” among communities of color, while also marking cultural
“difference” from the middle-class white norm as the cause of the “calamity”
of infant death. The segment, which questions whether co-sleeping deaths
should be criminalized, begins with a recorded 911 call in which parents
inform a dispatcher that their twelve-day-old baby is no longer breathing after
his intoxicated father fell asleep with him on the couch (pixelated images from
the segment suggest a man of color). The segment follows with a voiceover
announcing that “eight years after Milwaukee health officials first declared
co-sleeping a crisis babies are still dying while sleeping with adults.”101 The
images shown during this voiceover include several still photographs of adult
beds (presumably those in which co-sleeping deaths occurred), followed by a
picture of a black baby doll, and then images of malt liquor cans and bottles.
While the language in the segment is race-neutral, the imagery is not. The
black baby doll and “guilty” person of color racialize co-sleeping deaths, while
the inclusion of malt beverage cans and liquor bottles pathologize the families
in which they occur.
Representations such as these contribute to what is known as a “deficit
model” in assessing parenting practices, in which differences observed (or
imagined) between the parenting practices of minorities and those considered
the standard (white, middle-class, Americans) are interpreted as deficits rather
than “adaptive strategies,” or even improved re-imaginings of normative
family structure and practice.102 Examples of the institutionalization of this
perspective include a 1965 government study called the Moynihan Report,

which tied the economic and social problems of contemporary black families
to what it termed a pathological, matriarchal family structure.103 More recent
legislative efforts include proposed changes to the Temporary Assistance for
Needy Families (TANF) program that would increase work requirements for
eligible participants.104 The paternalism behind such legislation is similar to
the risk elimination stance toward bed-sharing. The risk elimination position
assumes that some parents cannot understand or be trusted with nuanced
messages about safety and therefore must be confronted with blanket
prohibitions on practices that have the potential for harm.
Medicine and public policy may actually be working together to reinforce
this message in gendered (and racialized) ways. As Barbara Gurr argues in
Reproductive Justice: The Politics of Health Care for Native American Women,
mainstream health care discourses, including an evidence-based medicine
approach, may fail to capture what she calls the “social aspects of reproductive
health care.” These include the “broader political, economic, and social forces”
that shape the experience of and interactions with institutions of medicine.105
Guidelines for reproductive behaviors like alcohol use during pregnancy,
cesarean deliveries versus vaginal births, and caffeine consumption while
nursing are part of an environment in which lower risk is valued more highly
than parents’ own knowledge about their bodies and their babies. As Gurr
argues, an over-reliance or uncritical acceptance of empirical measures can
discredit alternative ways of knowing about health, and “these processes have
always been not only sexed and gendered but also raced and classed, and thus
cannot be extricated from social and political drives toward homogenization
and assimilation, masked as efficiency.”106 For example, in 2010, the City
of Milwaukee Health Department held a Safe Sleep Summit to present
information about the relationship between safe sleep and infant death, and
to “build consensus around the need for a consistent message on safe sleep
from the community.”107 The intended audience of the summit included
health care providers, social workers, business leaders, legislators, and faith
leaders. During the question and answer session, later published online by
the Milwaukee Health Department, one attendee asked, “How many families
safely co-sleep in Milwaukee?” The following is the health department’s
response:
Bed-sharing is riskier for a baby than sleeping in a safe crib. An analogy
might be wearing a bicycle helmet: it’s possible to ride carefully without
your helmet, but it’s safer to wear it. Of course, many people do ride
without a helmet, and many people who ride a bicycle without a helmet
never crash or get hurt, but that doesn’t mean that riding without your

helmet is ‘safe.’ Again, bed-sharing is riskier for a baby than sleeping in
a safe crib.108
This response sidesteps the possibility that bed-sharing could be done
safely, instead framing the question within the paradigm of risk. Inherent to
the response is the assumption that risk cannot be adequately mitigated by
educating parents about how to co-sleep safely, and thus the only reasonable
alternative is to eliminate bed-sharing altogether. Alternative ways of know-
ing that are not backed by scientific research or data are dismissed, which may
disproportionately affect women and people of color whose epistemologies
are marginalized in science and medicine.109
Wisconsin is, of course, not the only state to utilize marketing campaigns to
promote safe sleep. Tennessee’s ABC campaign has a similar message (“Babies
should sleep Alone, on their Back, in a Crib”)—that the safest place for a
newborn to sleep is in the same room, but not the same bed, as a caregiver—
but its marketing materials are much different. They include magnets and
door hangers with the ABC message, flyers that also promote breastfeeding
and smoking cessation, and posters that demonstrate a safe sleep environment
with pictures of a baby of color sleeping on her back, in a crib free of blankets
and pillows, wearing a sleep sack. The picture of the infant is surrounded
by reminders like “do not smoke,” “use a tight fitting sheet,” and “no toys in
the crib” along with the ABC message.110 New York City also launched a Safe
Sleep Campaign in April 2015, with the tagline “Stay Close. Sleep Apart.” The
campaign is centered on four guidelines: that babies should not sleep on a
couch or adult bed, that babies should sleep alone, that no objects (such as
blankets or toys) should be on the sleep surface, and that babies should always
sleep on their backs. In addition to a thirty-second video spot shared online,
advertisements for the campaign were placed in subways and bus shelters in
English and Spanish and show sleeping babies (their race/ethnicity varies
among ads) being placed in cribs on their backs. Each image includes the
campaign tagline, an abbreviated version of the preceding guidelines, the
warning that “every year about 50 babies in NYC die from a sleep-related
injury,” and a number to call for more information.111 Both Tennessee and New
York City’s campaigns promote the message that babies should sleep alone,
without relying on the shock tactics employed by Milwaukee, and they offer
more guidance as to what a safe sleep environment might look like.112
Deaths attributed to bed-sharing have continued in Milwaukee while the
campaign itself has wound down—as of 2013 the City reported fifteen deaths
annually attributed to unsafe sleep environments for the preceding five years.
Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett acknowledged to local news media, “The mes-

sage is clearly not getting through, and we need to do a better job of making
sure this message is heard.”113 Perhaps in response, Milwaukee has created a
more recent initiative to prevent infant mortality, tag-lined “I Want a Strong
Baby,” which does seem to foreground issues like prenatal care, prematurity,
and smoking cessation and warrants further research.
This does not mean that attention to bed-sharing has entirely waned
in Wisconsin; in 2015 the Wisconsin Senate Health Committee heard testi-
mony on a bill that proposes to make it a felony to injure or kill an infant by
bed-sharing under the influence. Republican State Representative Samantha
Kerkman, author of the bill, explains that she just wants people to “make bet-
ter choices,” as if the death of an infant is a choice that parents are selecting
among other options. She also authored a second bill that would require po-
lice to take blood samples from any caregiver involved in a “suspicious infant
death” in order to test for drug and alcohol use.114 These efforts are counter-
intuitive, given the statistics from the Milwaukee Health Department finding
that exposure to second-hand smoke is correlated with SIDS deaths in much
higher numbers than drug and alcohol use.115 Limiting the exposure of infants
to second-hand smoke is more difficult to legislate, however, than a blood
test taken after an infant’s death has already occurred. Black Health Coali-
tion of Wisconsin president and African American activist Patricia McManus
has responded to the proposed criminalization of co-sleeping by addressing
the race and class implications. She warns that such legislation would dispro-
portionately impact low-income communities of color, who are under greater
state surveillance than are wealthier, white communities and experience more
severe consequences for their actions.116 As Dorothy Roberts argues, women
of color face heightened exposure to punitive government intervention into
their reproductive lives and are increasingly held individually responsible for
health outcomes that are tied to the systemic, structural effects of racism.117
As Roberts’s research suggests, it is important to note that a campaign tar-
geting the reproduction and families of women of color is neither isolated
nor new. Neither is the resistance to these messages. For example, 2010 saw
the placement of anti-abortion billboards in Georgia during black history
month with the message, “Black children are an endangered species.” These
billboards spread to other locations, as did the “black abortion as genocide”
message. To draw attention to the high rates of abortion among black women,
other organizations have sponsored billboards with the tagline, “the most
dangerous place for an African American is in the womb.”118 Reproductive jus-
tice organizers including Sistersong have responded by forming a coalition
with the slogan “trust black women,” meant to reinforce an intersectional,
race- and gender-based resistance to attacks on black women’s reproductive

autonomy.119 Women of color have likewise mobilized against the anti-bed-
sharing message in Milwaukee. The Black Health Coalition of Wisconsin has
responded to the Safe Sleep Campaign by producing their own materials to
inform parents about co-sleeping. The coalition created a documented titled
“Tips on How To Safely Co-Sleep with an Infant” based on focus groups with
Hmong, African American, and Latina mothers and families.120
This effort is a form of resistance because it demands, first, that knowl-
edge can be produced by and for communities of color, and second, that these
communities can both create and comprehend nuanced messages about par-
enting, like how to co-sleep safely. As the feminist scholar Andrea Smith ar-
gues, women of color and indigenous reproductive justice organizations are
making some of the most important interventions in reproductive politics to-
day and are “focusing not simply on influencing law and policy but on build-
ing a reproductive justice movement in which people begin to take charge of
their reproductive health.”121 The tip sheet does just that by advising parents
on the potential hazards of co-sleeping, and how to avoid them, while also
acknowledging that parents of color make conscious, careful decisions about
bed-sharing based on well thought-out philosophies of child-rearing. Given
that such a large proportion of parents are bed-sharing on a regular or occa-
sional basis, outreach efforts should follow the lead of the Black Health Coa-
lition of Wisconsin’s tip sheet, in that they involve “risk minimization” rather
than “risk elimination.” In other words, they should follow the path of orga-
nizations like UNICEF, whose sample policy on bed-sharing warns parents
only against “risky” sleeping conditions rather than all bed-sharing across the
board.122
Campaigns to reduce infant mortality should be based on research about
how and why parents bed-share and should not disproportionately target al-
ready marginalized communities. It is worth noting, however, that it is very
unlikely that the City of Milwaukee Health Department, and the advertising
agency responsible for Milwaukee’s Safe Sleep Campaign, have any kind of
racist intentions in promoting their message. Their goal is to reduce infant
mortality, particularly among communities that have alarmingly high rates of
infant death, and that is admirable. However, the health department is oper-
ating within a larger system of racial oppression, and regardless of their inten-
tions, the effects of this campaign are unjust in that it targets individual fami-
lies rather than tackling the problems of health care access, prenatal care, and
prematurity that are socially stratified by race and class. Moreover, it is worth
reiterating that the primary causes of infant mortality in Milwaukee are not
linked to co-sleeping, or even attributed to SIDS, but rather to prematurity
and congenital abnormalities. As Geoffrey Swain, medical director for Mil-

waukee’s Health Department, noted in an interview with Milwaukee Public
Radio, deaths associated with premature birth are vastly overlooked:
Most of them are dying in the hospital. . . . You never hear about them.
Media never hears about them. . . . So what the public is hearing, is
they’re hearing all about these unsafe sleep deaths, they’re not hearing
about four times as many babies that are dying of prematurity. So we get
this skewed perception about what causes babies to die.123
Despite urging by Swain and others to put safe sleep within a larger con-
text of women’s health, this shift toward a neoliberal focus on individual, pri-
vatized responsibility for health outcomes reflected by Milwaukee’s campaign
is not unique. This campaign is also part of a spectrum of movements, poli-
cies, and laws that hinge on demonizing or even criminalizing the decision-
making practices of poor women and women of color. An assumed opposi-
tion between the interests of women and their fetuses or children undergirds
the Safe Sleep Campaigns as well as legislation that promotes fetal person-
hood (the idea that personhood and even citizenship begin at conception),
and it criminalizes women’s conduct during pregnancy and limits their repro-
ductive autonomy.124 Women who do not match the normative ideal of white,
middle-class motherhood are particularly vulnerable.
Conclusion
I now return briefly to the comparison between campaigns against bed-
sharing and the co-existing parenting advice that encourages mothers and
fathers to co-sleep with their children, particularly the philosophy of attach-
ment parenting. Again, bed-sharing and co-sleeping both refer to the prac-
tice of an adult sharing a bed with an infant, yet the similarities in how these
sleep arrangements are represented seems to stop there. The aforementioned
Time magazine cover story on attachment parenting critiques the parenting
philosophy, contending that it has more to do with “parental devotion and
self-sacrifice” than with raising self-sufficient children, as if there are only two
possible outcomes or motivations.125 The article is quite skeptical of attach-
ment parenting, yet “parental devotion and self-sacrifice” are highly idealized
traits, and are simultaneously racialized and classed ideologies. While Time
is criticizing attachment parents for being too devoted and self-sacrificial
when they practice tenets that include co-sleeping, Milwaukee’s Safe Sleep
Campaign casts bed-sharing parents in the opposite light—as reckless, unin-
formed, and dangerous.

Attachment parents are no strangers to critiques of co-sleeping, yet attach-
ment parenting remains a well-known component of a parenting style that is
associated with class (and often racial) privilege. Attachment parents are able
to create their own narratives of why they co-sleep; their parenting choices
are normalized as part of the current trend of a do-it-yourself, back to basics
lifestyle that includes a commitment to intensive parenting.126 Parents who
bed-share, in contrast, are written and spoken about, and are characterized
as a group in need of intervention. That this intervention takes the form of
risk elimination rather than risk management speaks to the limits of a top-
down approach to alleviating health inequalities. From a reproductive jus-
tice perspective, this disparity in treatment is not an anomaly but rather is
part of a continuum of reproductive health inequalities that have historical
and contemporary resonance in communities of color. In this instance, as in
many others, the state uses its resources to surveil parents of color through
a framework in which race and class are inseparable from the perception of
parenting ability and intentionality. The form that this intervention is taking
in Milwaukee under the guise of the Safe Sleep Campaign is risk-elimination
or even criminalization, rather than education about how to bed-share safely.
Public policies like the Safe Sleep Campaign reinforce stratified reproduction
by misleadingly locating bed-sharing as a primary cause of infant mortality,
dismissing any ideological or philosophical reasons for choosing bed-sharing
among the targeted communities, and aiming for elimination of the practice
rather than a broader vision of sleep safety. Again, these different responses to
sharing a bed with a child are about more than a controversy about safe sleep;
they reflect deeply sedimented beliefs about race, class, and parenting, while
also distracting from institutional responsibility for systemic inequalities in
health and wellness.
Laura Harrison is an associate professor in Gender and Women’s Studies at

Minnesota State University, Mankato. She researches the ways in which ideologies
of race, gender, and family formation intersect with reproductive technologies
and reproductive justice. Her first book, Brown Bodies, White Babies: The Politics
of Cross-Racial Surrogacy (NYU Press, 2016) examines the implications of assisted
reproductive technologies for contemporary understandings of race, kinship,
and gender. Her work on subjects ranging from surrogacy, reproductive politics,
representations of motherhood, and gender and feminist backlash has been published
in journals including Signs, Feminist Formations, Genders, Feminist Media Studies,
and Women’s Studies International Forum. Her current book project focuses on
neoliberalism, health, and infant sleep safety.

Notes
1. Milwaukee Health Department, “Safe Sleep Campaign,” https://city.milwaukee
.gov/health/Safe-Sleep-Campaign#.W5jqRc5Kjm5 (archived campaign materials;
original links used are now inactive).
2. According to the City of Milwaukee’s Safe Sleep Campaign website, the cam-
paign was rolled out in late 2009 and early 2010. Personal communication from the
City of Milwaukee’s health communications officer described the specific advertising
campaign analyzed in this essay as beginning in 2010 and rolling out new messages
through 2012. The website lists January 2010 as the date attached to the “Tombstone”
billboards (discussed later in this article) and two thirty-second radio spots titled
“Helpless” and “News.” The same website links to a Wisconsin Radio Network inter-
view with Anna Benton, Milwaukee Health Department’s Family and Community
Health Services director from December 30, 2009, discussing the Tombstone ads and
the goals of the campaign. The last efforts listed on the Safe Sleep Campaign’s website
are advertising materials from July 2012 marketing the message that babies should al-
ways sleep in a crib. See http://city.milwaukee.gov/health/Safe-Sleep-Campaign#.VwJ
_5xIrKu4 for all Safe Sleep Campaign advertising materials.
3. The terms bed-sharing and co-sleeping are often used interchangeably when dis-
cussing the City of Milwaukee’s campaign and infant deaths attributed to these prac-
tices in the news media. As I will discuss, the term co-sleeping has particular resonance
among those who identify as “attachment parents,” thus from here on I use co-sleeping
in reference to attachment parenting and bed-sharing elsewhere.
4. American Academy of Pediatrics, “SIDS and Other Sleep-Related Infant Deaths:
Expansion of Recommendations for a Safe Infant Sleeping Environment,” Pediatrics,
October 17, 2011, http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2011/10/12/peds
.2011-2284.
5. The CDC often refers to such deaths within the umbrella category of Sudden
Unexpected Infant Deaths (SUIDS), which includes SIDS, “unknown causes” (cases
that do not meet the criteria for SIDS but occur in an infant under the age of one), and
accidental suffocation or strangulation in bed. According to the CDC, tests such as
autopsy cannot accurately distinguish suffocation from SIDS; thus the environment in
which the child was found, or reports that another child or adult awoke on top of the
infant, seem to be the primary means of differentiating SIDS from suffocation. See the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “About SUID and SIDS,” last modified
May 26, 2015, http://www.cdc.gov/sids/aboutsuidandsids.htm.
6. Shellee Colen, “‘Like a Mother to Them: Stratified Reproduction and West Indian
Childcare Workers and Employers in New York,” in Conceiving the New World Order:
The Global Politics of Reproduction, ed. Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995), 78–102.

7. Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp, eds., Conceiving The New World Order: The
Global Politics of Reproduction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
8. Karen McCormack, “Stratified Reproduction and Poor Women’s Resistance,”
Gender and Society 19, no. 5 (2005): 660–79; Rickie Solinger, Beggars and Choosers:
How the Politics of Choice Shapes Adoption, Abortion, and Welfare in the United States
(New York: Hill and Wang, 2001).
9. Barbara Gurr, Reproductive Justice: The Politics of Health Care for Native Ameri-
can Women (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015).
10. Laury Oaks, Giving Up Baby: Safe Haven Laws, Motherhood, and Reproductive
Justice (New York: New York University Press, 2015); Michelle Hammond, Monica K.
Miller, and Timothy Griffin, “Safe Haven Laws as Crime Control Theater,” Child Abuse
and Neglect 34, no. 7 (2010): 545–52.
11. Australian Breastfeeding Association, “Analysis of the Ethical Issues in the
Breastfeeding and Bedsharing Debate,” Breastfeeding Review 20, no. 3 (2012): 7–17.
12. For more on the ways that institutional racism is masked by a focus on individ-
ual or familial “pathology,” see Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics,
and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-first Century (New York: New Press,
2012), among her other work.
13. Dorothy Roberts, “Race, Gender, and Genetic Technologies: A New Reproduc-
tive Dystopia?” in Feminist Surveillance Studies, ed. Rachel E. Dubrofsky and Shoshana
Magnet (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).
14. Feminist theorists have similarly argued that anti-abortion rhetoric has at times
utilized the discourse of saving “babies” from their mothers, or saving women from
irrational choice making. See Jennifer Denbow, Governed through Choice: Autonomy,
Technology, and the Politics of Reproduction (New York: New York University Press,
2015).
15. For more on how the decision making of poor women and women of color is
cast as reckless or uninformed, see Solinger, Beggars and Choosers, Dorothy Roberts,
Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York:
Vintage Books, 1998), Khiara Bridges, Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregnancy
as a Site of Racialization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Oaks, Giving
Up Baby.
16. Elena Gutierrez, Fertile Matters: The Politics of Mexican-Origin Women’s Repro-
duction (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008); Zakiya Luna and Kristin Luker, “Re-
productive Justice,” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 9, no. 1 (2013): 327–52;
Oaks, Giving Up Baby.
17. Sistersong, “What Is Reproductive Justice?” http://www.sistersong.net/index
.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=141&Itemid=81.
18. Kimala Price, “What Is Reproductive Justice? How Women of Color Activists
Are Redefining the Pro-Choice Paradigm,” Meridians 10, no. 2 (2010): 42–65.

19. Jennifer Nelson, Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement (New
York: NYU Press, 2003).
20. Sistersong, “What Is Reproductive Justice?” http://www.sistersong.net/index.
php?option=com_content&view=article&id=141&Itemid=81; Price, “What Is Repro-
ductive Justice?”
21. Price, “What Is Reproductive Justice?”
22. This connection between the safety of an infant and the safety or danger
posed by a vehicle is reminiscent of Janelle Taylor’s analysis of an early 1990s Volvo
commercial. The commercial was dominated by an ultrasound image of a fetus in
the womb, with the tagline “Is something inside telling you to buy a Volvo?” Taylor
describes this as the equation “of the image of fetus with endangered childhood in
need of parental protection,” which “drew upon public cultural deployments of fetal
imagery in antiabortion materials.” See Janelle Taylor, The Public Life of the Fetal
Sonogram: Technology, Consumption, and the Politics of Reproduction (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 2008), 2–3. The Safe Sleep radio piece likewise plays upon
parental anxiety about safety and risk, but in this case the parent is positioned as an
embodied threat to the child, rather than a consumer for whom safety is a commodity.
23. Sears is probably best known for The Baby Book: Everything You Need to Know
About Your Baby from Birth to Age Two, first published in 1993, but other titles (most
co-authored with wife Martha Sears) include The Complete Book of Christian Par-
enting and Child Care (1997), The Pregnancy Book (1997), The Family Nutrition Book
(1999), The Successful Child (2002), The Fussy Baby (2002), and Becoming a Father
(2003), among many others. Many cultural critics argue that Sears’s attachment par-
enting philosophy is primarily aimed at middle- and upper-class women, given the
time-intensive demands of the practice, and the authors’ own assertions that it is best
for young children if mothers stay at home. See Katha Pollit’s “Attachment Parent-
ing: More Guilt for Mothers,” Guardian, May 18, 2012, http://www.theguardian.com
/commentisfree/2012/may/18/attachment-parenting-guilt-mothers.
24. William Sears, Martha Sears, Robert Sears, and James Sears, The Baby Book:
Everything You Need to Know About Your Baby from Birth to Age Two (Revised and
Updated Edition) (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 2003), 341.
25. William Sears and Martha Sears, The Attachment Parenting Book: A Common-
sense Guide to Understanding and Nurturing Your Baby (Boston: Little, Brown, and
Company, 2001), 91.
26. Emily Matchar, Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Do-
mesticity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013).
27. Kate Pickert, “The Man Who Remade Motherhood,” Time, May 21, 2012, http://
time.com/606/the-man-who-remade-motherhood/.
28. Feifei Sun, “Beyond the Cover: Are You Mom Enough?” Time, May 10, 2012,
http://time.com/3450144/behind-the-cover-are-you-mom-enough/.

29. For more on hegemonic beauty ideals for women, see Debra Gimlin, Body
Work: Beauty and Self-Image in American Culture (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2002); Brenda Weber, Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).
30. For more on intensive mothering, see Sharon Hays, The Cultural Contradictions
of Motherhood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).
31. Matchar, Homeward Bound.
32. Sears et al., The Baby Book, 239.
33. Sears et al., The Baby Book.
34. Sears et al., The Baby Book, 331.
35. Alec MacGillis, “The Unelectable Whiteness of Scott Walker,” New Republic,
June 15, 2014, http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118145/scott-walkers-toxic-racial
-politics.
36. Karen Herzog and Crocker Stephenson, “Ad Campaign Unveiled as An-
other Co-Sleeping Death Is Announced,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, November 9,
2011, http://www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/ad-campaign-unveiled-as-another
-cosleeping-death-is-announced-s030073-133552808.html.
37. “Community Health Needs Assessment,” Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin,
2013, http://www.chw.org/~/media/Files/Childrens%20And%20Community
/MilwaukeeAssessment2013.pdf.
38. Herzog and Stephenson, “Ad Campaign Unveiled.”
39. Karen Herzog, “Milwaukee Sets Goal to Reduce Infant Mortality,” Milwaukee
Journal Sentinel, November 8, 2011, http://www.jsonline.com/news/health/milwaukee
-sets-goal-to-reduce-infant-mortality-st2vff2-133504268.html.
40. United States Census Bureau, “State and County Quick Facts,” https://www
.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045217.
41. Kenya Downs, “Why Is Milwaukee So Bad for Black People?” National Pub-
lic Radio, March 5, 2015, http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2015/03/05/390723644
/why-is-milwaukee-so-bad-for-black-people.
42. Downs, “Why Is Milwaukee So Bad for Black People?”
43. Daniel Losen, Cheri Hodson, Michael A. Keith II, Katrina Morrison, and Shakti
Belway, “Are We Closing the School Discipline Gap?” Center for Civil Rights Rem-
edies, February 23, 2015, http://civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/resources/projects/center
-for-civil-rights-remedies/school-to-prison-folder/federal-reports/are-we-closing-the
-school-discipline-gap/AreWeClosingTheSchoolDisciplineGap_FINAL221.pdf/.
44. Molly Beck, “National Report Card: Wisconsin’s Achievement Gap Worst in
Nation,” Wisconsin State Journal, November 8, 2013, http://host.madison.com/news
/local/education/local_schools/national-report-card-wisconsin-s-achievement-gap
-worst -in -nation /article _82406e47 -5738 -5e95 -9cb0 -78aee1e14254 .html ?comment
_form=true.

45. Losen et al., “Are We Closing the School Discipline Gap?”
46. Richard Florida, “The U.S. Cities Where the Poor are Most Segregated from
Everyone Else,” Atlantic, March 24, 2014, http://www.citylab.com/housing/2014/03/us
-cities-where-poor-are-most-segregated/8655/.
47. Annie E. Casey Foundation, “Race for Results: Building a Path to Opportu-
nity for All Children,” March 29, 2014, http://www.aecf.org/m/resourcedoc/AECF
-RaceforResults-2014.pdf, 3.
48. Christopher M. Span, “Black Milwaukee’s Challenge to the Cycle of Urban
Miseducation: Milwaukee’s African American Immersion Schools,” Urban Education
37, no. 5 (2002): 617.
49. Casey Foundation, “Race for Results,” 11.
50. Downs, “Why Is Milwaukee So Bad for Black People?”
51. DeAnnah R. Byrd, Patrick L. Remington, and Murray L. Katcher, “Reducing
Black Infant Mortality in Wisconsin: Best Practices and Model Programs,” Wisconsin
Public Health and Health Policy 6, no. 3 (2005).
52. The majority of “natural” infant deaths in Milwaukee are a result of complica-
tions of premature birth (60%) and birth defects (20%). See Milwaukee Health Depart-
ment, “Infant Mortality,” http://city.milwaukee.gov/Infant-Mortality#.VFu-n4fB9e_.
53. “Premature Births and the Environment,” Centers for Disease Con-
trol and Prevention, last modified June 6, 2014, http://ephtracking.cdc.gov
/showRbPrematureBirthEnv.action.
54. Fleda Jackson, Mona Phillips, Carol Hogue, and Tracy Curry-Owens, “Examin-
ing the Burdens of Gendered Racism: Implications for Pregnancy-Outcomes Among
College-Educated African American Women,” Maternal and Child Health Journal 5,
no. 2 (2001): 95–107.
55. Samuel Kelton Roberts Jr., Infectious Fear: Politics, Disease, and the Health Ef-
fects of Segregation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 2009.
56. See Elena Conis, Vaccine Nation: America’s Changing Relationship with Immu-
nization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 2015; Kelton Roberts, Infectious Fear.
57. Jay Sorgi, “Barrett Starts Six Year Campaign to Drop Infant Mortality Rates,”
November 9, 2011, http://www.620wtmj.com/news/local/133534223.html (inactive).
58. Milwaukee Health Department, “Safe Sleep Campaign,” https://city.milwaukee
.gov/health/Safe-Sleep-Campaign#.W5jqRc5Kjm5 (archives; original links now
inactive).
59. Milwaukee Health Department, “Safe Sleep Campaign.”
60. The “back to sleep” campaign, recommended by the American Academy of Pe-
diatricians and introduced nationwide in 1994, recommended that infants should not
be put to sleep on their stomachs (in the prone position), and has been credited with
a one third drop in SIDS deaths among singleton births. Daniel A. Powers and Seung-

Eun Song, “Absolute Change in Cause-Specific Infant Mortality for Blacks and Whites
in the U.S.: 1983–2002,” Population Research and Policy Review 28, no. 6 (2009): 817–
51. The Safe Sleep Campaign incorporates the successful “back to sleep” message in its
marketing materials by instructing parents to put children to sleep on their backs and,
in materials rolled out in July 2012, with three ads representing babies of varying eth-
nicities sleeping in safe sleep environments—in cribs, on their backs, with no blankets,
pillows, or toys, and the message: “Babies should always sleep in a crib” followed by “If
you can’t afford a crib, please call [phone number].” It is possible that these marketing
materials, far less controversial than the “Knife” or “Tombstone” ads, were more mea-
sured in response to the media and community backlash against the earlier ads. Mil-
waukee’s campaign builds beyond “back to sleep,” however, by specifically targeting
bed-sharing in relation to SIDS. American Academy of Pediatricians, “AAP Expands
Guidelines for Infant Sleep Safety and SIDS Risk Reduction,” October 18, 2011, https://
www.aap.org /en -us /about -the -aap /aap -press -room /pages /aap -expands -guidelines
-for-infant-sleep-safety-and-sids-risk-reduction.aspx.
61. “City of Milwaukee Safe Sleep Program Background,” email message to author,
March 4, 2015.
62. Mary C. Sobralske and Megan E. Gruber, “Risks and Benefits of Parent/Child
Bed Sharing,” Journal of the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners 21 (2009):
474–79.
63. Margaret H. Blabey and Bradford D. Gessner, “Infant Bed-Sharing Practices
and Associated Risk Factors Among Births and Infant Deaths in Alaska,” Public Health
Reports 124 (2009): 527–34.
64. Milwaukee Health Department, “Safe Sleep Summit Questions and Answers,”
http://city.milwaukee.gov/health/SSSQandQ.htm#.Vuh1oce-olY.
65. James J. McKenna and Thomas McDade, “Why Babies Should Never Sleep
Alone: A Review of the Co-Sleeping Controversy in Relation to SIDS, Bedsharing, and
Breastfeeding,” Paediatric Respiratory Reviews 6 (2005): 134–52; Sobralske and Gruber,
“Risks and Benefits of Parent/Child Bed Sharing.”
66. “A Final Resting Place,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, December 29, 2009, http://
www.jsonline.com/news/opinion/80233402.html.
67. Cary Docter, “Should Co-Sleeping that Results in Death be Criminalized?” Fox-
6News, September 26, 2013, http://fox6now.com/2013/09/26/should-co-sleeping-that
-results-in-death-be-criminalized/.
68. Anna Tsing, “Monster Stories: Women Charged with Perinatal Endangerment,”
in Uncertain Terms: Negotiating Gender in American Culture, ed. Faye Ginsburg and
Anna Tsing (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), 282. See also Molly Ladd-Taylor and Laurie
Umansky, “Bad” Mothers: The Politics of Blame in the Twentieth Century (New York:
New York University Press, 1998).

69. Bridges, Reproducing Race, 16.
70. Serve Marketing, “Co-Sleeping,” http://servemarketing.org/work/infant
-mortality/co-sleeping/.
71. Serve Marketing, “Pregnant Boys,” http://servemarketing.org/work
/teen-pregnancy/pregnant-boys/. For an analysis of this campaign, see Laura Tanner,
“Queering Teenage Pregnancy Prevention: Temporality and Happiness Rhetoric in
the Milwaukee Campaign 2006–2015,” Conference paper presented at the National
Women’s Studies Association, 2015. Tanner argues that the campaign utilizes shame
and disgust toward the specter of male pregnancy to stigmatize teen mothers further
in ways that are deeply classed, gendered, and racialized.
72. Serve Marketing, http://servemarketing.org/work/.
73. Clear Channel Outdoor, email message to author, September 19, 2013.
75. Alison Jaggar, Just Methods: An Interdisciplinary Feminist Reader (Boulder, CO:
Paradigm Publishers, 2013).
76. Leith Mullings and Amy J. Schulz, “Intersectionality and Health: An Introduc-
tion,” in Gender, Race, Class, and Health, ed. Leith Mullings and Amy J. Schulz (San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006), 4.
77. Jaggar, Just Methods.
78. Latoya Dennis, “Does Milwaukee’s Ad Campaign Against Sleeping with Ba-
bies Go Too Far?” National Public Radio, November 30, 2011, http://www.npr.org
/blogs /health /2011 /11 /30 /142914169 /does -milwaukees -campaign -against -sleeping
-with-babies-go-too-far.
80. Crocker Stephenson, “Safe Sleep Campaign Hits the Streets,” Milwaukee Jour-
nal Sentinel, July 13, 2010, http://www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/98386109.html.
82. Milwaukee Health Department, “Infant Mortality,” http://city.milwaukee.gov
/health/Infant-Mortality#.VY2EC6Z4EZU.
83. See Ladd-Taylor and Umansky, “Bad” Mothers; Susan J. Douglas and Meredith
W. Michaels, The Mommy Myth (New York: Free Press, 2005); Judith Warner, Perfect
Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety (New York: Riverhead Books, 2006).
84. Laura Briggs, Somebody’s Children: The Politics of Transnational and Transracial
Adoption (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 9.
85. Milwaukee Health Department, “Cribs for Kids Program,” http://city.milwaukee
.gov/health/cribs-for-Kids#.VY2E4qZ4EZU.
86. Bonnie Richman, “Controversial Posters of Babies Sleeping with Knives Aim
to Reduce Co-Sleeping Deaths,” Time, November 18, 2011, http://healthland.time.com
/2011/11/18/can-posters-of-babies-with-knives-reduce-co-sleeping-deaths/.

87. Paula Reed Ward, “Group Donates Cribs to Promote Safe Sleep for Babies,”
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, November 26, 2010, http://www.post-gazette.com
/news/state/2010/11/26/Group-donates-cribs-to-promote-safe-sleep-for-babies/stories
/201011260129.
88. “City of Milwaukee Safe Sleep Program Background,” email message to author,
March 4, 2015.
89. Bridges, Reproducing Race.
90. Dorothy Roberts, Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (New York: Basic
Books, 2001).
91. Milwaukee Health Department, “Cribs for Kids Program,” http://city.milwaukee
.gov/health/cribs-for-Kids#.VY2E4qZ4EZU.
92. Martin B. Lahr, Kenneth D. Rosenberg, and Jodi A. Lapidus, “Maternal-Infant
Bedsharing: Risk Factors for Bedsharing in a Population-Based Survey of New Moth-
ers and Implications for SIDS Risk Reduction,” Maternal Child Health 11 (2007).
93. Christine Ateah and Kathy Hamelin, “Maternal Bedsharing Practices, Experi-
ences, and Awareness of Risks,” Journal of Obstetric Gynecologic & Neonatal Nursing
37, no. 3: 274–81.
94. Erin Toner, “Co-Sleeping Deaths Persist in Milwaukee,” Wisconsin Public Ra-
dio, December 4, 2013, http://wuwm.com/post/co-sleeping-deaths-persist-milwaukee.
95. Lahr et al., “Maternal-Infant Bed-Sharing.”
96. Marc H. Bornstein, Handbook of Parenting, Volume Four: Social Conditions and
Applied Parenting (New York: Routledge, 2002).
98. Jesse Daniels and Amy Schulz, “Constructing Whiteness in Health Disparities
Research,” in Gender, Race, Class, and Health, ed. Leith Mullings and Amy J. Schulz
(San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006), 89–130.
99. H. Jack Geiger, “Health Disparities: What Do We Know? What Do We Need to
Know? What Should We Do?” in Gender, Race, Class, and Health, ed. Leith Mullings
and Amy J. Schulz (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006), 261–88.
100. Daniels and Schulz, “Constructing Whiteness in Health Disparities Research.”
101. Bryan Polcyn and Leann Watson, “‘I Just Don’t Want Any Baby to Die’: Law-
makers Struggle for Consensus on Cosleeping Legislation,” Fox6News, January 25,
2015, http://fox6now.com/2015/01/25/i-just-dont-want-any-baby-to-die-the-challenge
-in-finding-a-solution-to-co-sleeping-deaths/.
102. Bornstein, Handbook of Parenting, 3.
103. See Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1983);
Roberts, Killing the Black Body.
104. Susan Cornwell, “US Panel Approves Work Requirement for Welfare,” Reuters,
May 24, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-congress-welfare/u-s-house
-panel-approves-work-requirement-for-welfare-idUSKCN1IP374.

105. Barbara Gurr, Reproductive Justice: The Politics of Health Care for Native
American Women (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 5.
106. Gurr, Reproductive Justice, 50.
108. Milwaukee Health Department, “Safe Sleep Summit Questions and Answers.”
109. Gurr, Reproductive Justice.
110. Tennessee Department of Health, “Safe Sleep Materials,” https://www.tn.gov
/health /health -program -areas /fhw /vipp /safe -sleep /safe -sleep -campaign -materials
.html.
111. For images from New York City’s campaign, see DCF Advertising’s website,
http://dcfadvertising.com/work/stay-close-sleep-apart/. See also New York City
Health Department, “Sleep Safety,” http://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/health/health-topics
/pregnancy-sleep-safety.page; Bill De Blasio, “Simple Rules for Sleeping Babies,” New
York Daily News, April 12, 2015, http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/bill-de-blasio
-simple-rules-sleeping-babies-article-1.2182361.
112. Ideally, health departments would also address how to co-sleep safely for par-
ents who choose to do so and would partner with community organizations to include
parents in these dialogues. The Black Health Coalition of Wisconsin’s “Tips for How
to Safely Co-Sleep with an Infant” would be one model.
113. “Is Milwaukee’s Anti-Co-Sleeping Campaign Working?” Fox6News, February
21, 2012, http://fox6now.com/2012/02/21/two-infants-die-in-co-sleeping-incidents-in
-milwaukee/.
114. Polcyn and Watson, “I Just Don’t Want Any Baby to Die.”
116. Polcyn and Watson, “I Just Don’t Want Any Baby to Die.”
117. Roberts, “Race, Gender, and Reproductive Technologies.”
118. Miriam Zoila Perez, “Past and Present Collide as the Black Anti-Abortion
Movement Grows,” Colorlines, March 3, 2011, http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/03
/past_and_present_collide_as_the_black_anti-abortion_movement_grows.html.
119. Loretta Ross, “Fighting Black Anti-Choice Campaigns: Trust Black Women,”
RH Reality Check, February 28, 2011, http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2011/02/28
/fighting-black-antiabortion-campaign-trusting-black-women/.
120. Black Health Coalition of Wisconsin, “Tips on How to Safely Co-Sleep with an
Infant,” http://media.trb.com/media/acrobat/2009-04/46428303.pdf (inactive).
121. Andrea Smith et al., “Roundtable: Reproductive Technologies and Reproduc-
tive Justice,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 34, no. 3 (2013): 102–25.
122. Australian Breastfeeding Association, “Analysis of the Ethical Issues in the
Breastfeeding and Bedsharing Debate.”

123. Erin Toner, “Co-Sleeping Deaths Persist in Milwaukee.”
124. See Oaks, Giving Up Baby; Denbow, Governed through Choice; Jeanne Flavin,
Our Bodies, Our Crimes: The Policing of Reproduction in America (New York: New
York University Press, 2010).
125. Kate Pickert, “The Man Who Remade Motherhood,” Time, May 21, 2012,
http://time.com/606/the-man-who-remade-motherhood/. This dichotomy between
being an appropriately devoted parent or a suffocating “helicopter parent” (or, more
recently, a “lawnmower parent”) is reflected in many other parenting debates and
often carries race and class connotations. Once such example is the “breast is best”
rhetoric in which the advantages of breast feeding are often idealized to the point
where mothers who cannot or choose not to breastfeed are demonized as selfish,
uncaring, or uneducated. For more on changing discourses of ideal motherhood in
America, see Rima Apple, Perfect Motherhood: Science and Childrearing in America
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006).
126. See Hays, The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood.

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Bed- Sharing, Co- Sleeping, and Attachment Parenting

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Bed- Sharing and Child Safety

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Tombstones, Knives, and Guerilla Warfare

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Barriers to Safe Sleep Success

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Laura Harrison is an associate professor in Gender and Women’s Studies at

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